Corporate Boards Call on the Expertise of Retired Executives
[9 February 2006 - New York Times] The last thing Martin Coyne II wanted to do after taking early retirement in 2003 from his job as executive vice president of the Kodak Corporation's photography division was to return to the 12-hour days and the stress of the corporate world. Yet, he was only 55, and he yearned to put his management expertise to good use without wearing himself out. Skip to next paragraph Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesMartin Coyne II, a retired Kodak executive, is a director for Akamai Technologies and two other companies. So he chose an increasingly popular alternative: a career as a professional corporate director at small or medium-size companies. Mr. Coyne was already on one board � the Akamai Technologies Corporation, based in Cambridge, Mass., with revenue in 2004 of $210 million. He has since joined the board of a second medium-size company and he is a senior adviser to two others. "When I started out, it was more to keep busy than anything else," Mr. Coyne says. "I wanted to keep my brain engaged. But I quickly discovered you can contribute more value to these boards than you could doing a full-time job." Corporate boards, especially at start-ups and small and medium-size businesses, are showing a growing appetite for activist directors like Mr. Coyne, who ran a $6.5 billion division at Kodak. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, aimed at cleaning up corporate accounting in the wake of the Enron scandal, has put tremendous pressure on the boards of companies to uphold the highest standards of good governance. And who better to help guide those companies than experienced hands from the higher echelons of the corporate world? Retirees-turned-directors include several millionaires who left their full-time perches at Microsoft, Cisco Systems and eBay. ...