Monday, February 22, 2010

Social Graphing of Board Appointments

The Economist ran a story a few weeks back citing a study that said that corporate boards where there were social ties between the CEO and board members (roughly 45% I think) resulted in share price underperformance. Serving on multiple boards together also doesn't look like it enhances performance (insert your penis enlargement joke here). I find it hard to believe that none of the big vendors tracking corporate actions (dividends, stock splits, mergers, etc.) doesn't / couldn't easily track board appointments.  From there it would be trivial to overlay some sort of social graphing thingamabob to show who's on what board with whom.

You could also add some kind of manual wiki thingie which would let people observe social ties via sightings in Vanity Fair and other society rags and plug them into the graph.  It would be very interesting.

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