Claremont McKenna College

18th Annual Kravis-de Roulet Conference
Leading Corporate Boardrooms: The New Rules

In recent years, new boardroom practices have emerged which aim to strengthen the leadership role of directors. Their goal is simple - to create a healthier balance of power between the CEO and the board. The critical question is whether these practices really work. For example, we are witnessing a dramatic growth in the use of lead directors and in the appointments of non-executive chairmen. How effective are these leadership roles? Who among directors is best suited to play them? What are common dilemmas they pose to their incumbents? Important shifts have also begun to occur in the leadership role of board committees. What practices facilitate genuine committee leadership?

The 18th Annual Kravis-de Roulet Conference was held on January 25, 2008 in The Waldorf Astoria, New York.

Speakers

17th annual Kravis-de Roulet Conference

The Early Seeds of Leadership:

Growing the Next Generation of Leaders

Today more than ever, there is a need for leadership. This need does not go unnoticed. We spend billions in our organizations attempting to develop leaders to provide compelling visions, manage their people effectively, and steer their organizations to profitability. Recent corporate scandals, however, suggest that important lessons of leadership are not always utilized. Corporate training in leadership is not the only place leadership skills are acquired. New leaders come to organizations with many leadership lessons and experiences learned at very young ages. Ensuring that these are positive experiences to help guide these young leaders in later life is important, but little is known about the best ways to encourage leadership development before individuals enter the workforce.   

The 17th annual Kravis-de Roulet Conference was held February 24, 2007 in Claremont. This year’s theme brought together an impressive slate of speakers including Howard Gardner, Harvard University, to discuss the many developmental influences on our next generation of leaders. 

Agenda                 Speakers

16th Annual Kravis-de Roulet Leadership Conference

Rethinking Followership

Sponsored by Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Leadership at the Peter F. Drucker and Matsatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, the conference was held February 24 and 25, 2006.

This Conference took as its unusual mission the initiation of a new area of scholarship and consultancy:  Followership as an active, ethical, creative, and effective enterprise.  Until now, scholars, the media, and consultants, too, have placed leaders in the spotlight. By contrast, followers have been largely ignored, obscured by the long shadows cast by leaders. We know there is far more to the puzzle, and this conference was designed to start assembling the necessary pieces to develop a larger, more accurate, and useful picture. Placing followers in the foreground allows us to examine their multiple roles. This strategy emphasizes their potential contributions, rights, and responsibilities to the leader, to the group, to society, and to themselves.

We have drawn on the broadest range of disciplines and fields to examine all aspects of followership.  For example, what are the different roles followers play and how do their behavior and attitudes affect the leader's performance? What part do followers legitimately play in setting the standards and formulating the culture and policies of the group? There are many other questions to raise and explore, and this conference signals merely the beginning.

The conference focused on new models of followership and explored fresh perspectives on the contributions followers make to the efficacy of leaders, as well as on the dynamic between followers/constituents and leaders. With such reinvigorated conceptualizations of followers, we have gained greater, more critical insights into the process of leadership.

Video taped conference proceedings are available from  Kravis Leadership Institute at a cost of $40. To order, please email us at kravis.institute@cmc.edu. An edited volume is being compiled to be published by Jossey-Bass with an anticipated completion in late 2007.

agenda   speakers   post-conference materials

15th Annual Kravis-de Roulet Leadership Conference

Best Practices in Leadership

The goal of this year’s conference was to use research in leadership to inform the practice of leadership. Leading scholars in each area of leadership – from leader selection and development, to the assessment of leaders, to leader strategy and succession, to team leadership – summarized the relevant research and extract the best practices for use by practitioners.

book   agenda   speakers

14th Annual Kravis-de Roulet Leadership Conference