A vintage year.

• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE

HERE IS WHAT my year in governance was like, as I assembled Volume 35 in the 35-year publishing legacy of DIRECTORS & BOARDS. (Yes, that means this forerunner of governance publications, born in the storm of the bribery hearings in 1976 that gave rise to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2011.)

In the First Quarter edition we devoted the cover story to "Fixing the Annual Meeting." No surprise considering the wired world we live in today that a movement is afoot to bring the annual shareholders meeting into the digital age. Our esteemed advisory board member, Norman Augustine, stated it more eloquently when he wrote, "The challenge is to drag the corporate version of the 19th century towne meeting into the reality of the 21st century global market-place." Helping yank things along with their sound advisories were annual meetings experts Carl Hagberg, Richard Daly, Gary Lutin and several others active in the transformation of these towne meetings into a digital showcase.

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In the Second Quarter edition we tackled a topic that I freely admit rivets me--"Are Boards Too Old?" I wrote at the time that perhaps the last taboo in discussing board diversity is age diversity. To test the notion we invited a few intrepid denizens of the boardroom to take a whack at it. Dan Dalton of Indiana University, entrepreneur and corporate director Larry Kramer, and Donna Anderson of T. Rowe Price were among those willing to give this provocative proposition a thumbs up or down. Fair warning: I will be returning to this topic, as there are more dimensions yet to explore in what I still believe to be one of...