Book it: best bets for board reading: from a roundup of new books, insights on mutual fund directors and general counsels, measuring the ROI of human capital investment, graceful exiting at the top ... and the pause that refreshes.

• Position: THOUGHT LEADERSHIP - Reprint

Fund directors' exact holdings? That's secret

From The Clash of the Cultures by John C. Bogle. Copyright[c] 2012 by the author. Published by Wiley (www.wileyfinance.com).

I PREFER FUND DIRECTORS, executives, and portfolio managers who "eat their own cooking" by investing importantly in the shares of the funds they direct or manage, but not necessarily to the exclusion of other funds in the same fund complex. A few firms even take this philosophy to an extreme, requiring their insiders to invest all of their liquid assets in their funds, but that will not always be possible.

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Unfortunately, there's little solid information on this vital issue, and no requirement that management company officials and portfolio managers disclose their transactions in the shares of their funds.

As to fund holdings by directors, a serious, indeed inexplicable, information gap continues to exist. Somehow, the Investment Company Institute persuaded the SEC to exempt fund directors from disclosure of the precise number of shares they own, the standard for all other public corporations. Rather, fund directors need only disclose the range of their holdings: none; $10,000 or less; $10,000 to $50,000; $50,000 to $100,000; over $100,000, both for the fund and for all funds in the group. That may be better than no disclosure at all.

But why shouldn't an investor know if a director of the fund has increased his investment from say, $101,000 to $1 million? Or, perhaps even more important, reduced it from $1 million to $101,000. Yet that information remains secret, and present regulations suggest that it's indeed "none of your business." The sooner we revise the regulations to provide exact disclosure rather than inscrutable ranges, the better.

John C. Bogle founded the Vanguard Group of mutual funds in 1974. He retired as senior chairman in 2000 and now is president of the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center.

Be a graceful exiter

From Leaving on Top by David Heenan. Copyright@2012 by the author. Published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing (www.nicholasbrealey.com).

FOR MANY, letting go of a successful career means change, and such transitions are never easy. "Often they're frightening and painful," says Martin Groder, a Chapel Hill, N. C., psychiatrist and business consultant. "But on the other side of the struggle is a sense of rebirth and renewal." Therefore, those nearing the final role should start anew while they're still hale enough to face new...