from the EDITOR.

• Position: Brief Article

Service on corporate boards is a privilege, and one that seems to be getting harder to come by as boards shrink. Even long-time directors may find themselves losing their seats when companies merge and the resulting entity finds it has to cut to keep its new board from being huge and unwieldy.

As our cover story package points out, this shrinking process is paring the number of inside (company managers) directors -- making it increasingly unlikely that the company CFO has a seat at the big table. But top financial officers will be making their way onto outside boards as experts chosen for auditing committees, which are being monitored more closely these days by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the various U.S. stock exchanges.

Director activities represent another good example of how the winds of change in the greater business world have altered long-time practices. It's no longer considered acceptable for major companies to cobble together a board from the CEO's golfing or fishing pals, and active recruitment of women and minorities has been underway for years. Directors are expected to be better prepared and carry more responsibility; snoozing at the table (literally or figuratively) is taboo. Many of these changes are the result of long and sometimes noisy campaigns by shareholder activists and institutional investors who have railed at the prevailing status quo -- particularly when company performance has declined.

The problems of managing overseas subsidiaries have been in the news a lot lately, coming both from American companies like Xerox and foreign multinationals like Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products and DaimlerChrysler AG. Writer Paul...