In April 2017 Egon Zehnder brought together a notable group of General Counsels and Legal/ Compliance Heads in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing GCs in Greater China. Several themes emerged during the roundtable events—themes that are relevant to any GCs in the region.

In 2013, Carol SingletonSlade, Steve Goodman, Trent Aulbaugh and Roger Aguirre of Egon Zehnder’s Global Energy Practice warned of the dire need for identifying and training a new generation of qualified and prepared executives who are ready and willing to lead oil and gas companies. Four years later, as Chevron’s chief executive John Watson is set to step down, his likely replacement is a representation of this “new leadership for a changing oil world.”

The days when the main function of Audit Committees was to put a “stamp of approval” on companies’ financials are long gone. Heightened risk awareness and increased regulation means that Audit Committees must now take on a much more proactive role in detecting, understanding and acting on risk – be it financial, macroeconomic, regulatory, legal or cybersecurity-related.

Talking to Germany’s Compliance Manager magazine, Jörg Thierfelder explains that companies today are looking for “professionals who take compliance seriously, both as a standard of conduct and as a business factor.”

Board members today must grapple with increasingly complex matters of strategy and risk. In response, many companies are rethinking board meetings to enhance alignment, energize the board and elevate its performance.

If it seems like cybersecurity is always playing catch-up to a new generation of threats, it's because cybersecurity today still is where traffic safety was in the 1970s, writes Egon Zehnder’s Kal Bittianda for Security Roundtable.

James E. Hughes on the role of ritual.

What kinds of skills do general counsels need today? This article builds upon Egon Zehnder’s presentation at its Annual European General Counsel event in Paris on March 29 and 30, 2017.

What distinguishes an excellent general counsel from a good or merely acceptable one? To answer that question we recently mined information about more than 300 senior legal executives from among the thousands of management appraisals that we have conducted over the past several years.

For each issue of Experts we choose topics that we believe will be of great interest not only to General Counsels, but also to CEOs and Boards of Directors. Here, in Experts No. 3, we dive into the sensitive relationship between the General Counsel and the Board of Directors.