Knowledge@wharton

A board’s primary fiduciary responsibility is to ensure that a CEO is generating profits for shareholders but Mark Hurd’s abrupt departure from the top job at Hewlett-Packard underscores how boards of directors do not judge a CEO’s performance on company prosperity alone. Rather boards use a broad set of intangible criteria -- ranging from how well leaders are able to earn employees’ trust to how well they deal with customers to how they conduct themselves off site -- as a way of evaluating success or failure. But these standards experts say can be extraordinarily difficult for boards to assess. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.