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Show the Finance Committee, the Compensation Committee, and the Executive Committee. As their names imply, the Finance Committee and the Compensation Committee review and recommend to the Board actions in the fields of finance or compensation. The Executive Committee, while empowered to act for the Board on all but certain matters, in practice meets once yearly to review the report to shareholders before it is finally mailed. This brief description of what the General Electric Board does may be insufficient for your purpose and, if so, I hope you will ask such specific questions as you may have in the "question and answer period" that will follow my remarks. Now I would like to devote the balance of my time to putting before you the particular qualities that I think set the General Electric Board apart from other boards and give it a special flavor all its own. From my personal knowledge and experience, I can tell you that there is a very great difference in the effectiveness of boards of directors, in how well or badly they do their jobs, in how much or how little they contribute to the effectiveness of the company, to its successes or its failures. Here we can speak off the record and be frank with each other. Certain things that are true in practice are not exactly as they are described in the text books on management, so I'll try to tell it like it is. It is true that the stockholders elect the directors, but in practice they rarely select the directors in a publicly held corporation. -6- |