From the editor.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Editorial

Tales from the trenches abound about the new challenges and the sharply higher accountability and workloads that directors face in the aftermath of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the various rules put in place by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the major stock exchanges. We're way past the days when a directorship on a major company board could even remotely be considered a sinecure; if anything, the demands may be pushing more people away from board service than luring them in.

In the first part of our cover package on corporate governance, Managing Editor Ellen M. Heffes interviews a number of top directors and gets their personal impressions of what board service has evolved into. More than ever, the board is the primary agent in dealing with crisis or the hiring and firing of the chief executive. Robert L. Ryan, head of the audit committee at Hewlett-Packard, says that the time and effort expended around the hiring of new HP CEO Mark Hurd surpassed anything he had seen in his 25 years of board service.

Also in the cover section, Patrick McGurn, chief counsel at Institutional Shareholder Services, provides a detailed and insightful look at the state of proxy challenges and shareholder concern about particular governance issues. And, Roger Raber, president and CEO of the National Association of Corporate Directors, rebuts the argument that liability threats--heightened by recent legal settlements--will deter many people from serving on boards.

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Employee diversity has been embraced for years by many leading companies. Edith Orenstein of the Financial Executives Research Foundation spoke to executives at a number of companies, including Cargill and Boeing, as well as workforce experts, and finds that there are several important elements to a business case for increased diversity.

While we've been writing regularly about compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley's Section 404, the article in this issue...