What we also discovered in putting the list together was that in some instances, it became impossible to separate the captain from the team. This year’s D100 is a case in point: Our editors and board of advisors were nearly unanimous in our selection of President Barack Obama as this year’s most powerful corporate governance influence. And yet, to do justice to the seismic shift his policies have brought about in the boardroom, we also had to recognize the many other  “New Voices” in the Administration who are now leading the greatest financial reform of American business since the 1930s.

So, we ask that in the pages ahead you pay more attention to who counts, and less to how we count, in arriving at our final selection of individuals and institutions that have met the requirement to be “most influential.” We think you’ll agree it’s an intricate and impressive mosaic where the whole equals much more than the sum of its parts, which may or may not be greater than 100.

Regulators & Rulemakers

Team Obama
It is often written that reasonable people may disagree, and with Americans and their Presidents, it is practically a way of life. But even an unreasonable person could only conclude that this President and his Administration are having a profound and lasting influence over the boardroom. President Barack Obama has demonstrated an enormous capacity for calm in uncertain times. His relative youth leads to frequent comparisons to John F. Kennedy and his communications skills to those of Ronald Reagan. But it is his aggressive response to the unparalleled economic challenges that greeted him at the dawn of his young presidency that harkens back to an earlier figure of towering influence,  Franklin D. Roosevelt.

FDR’s massive social and financial reform programs—the creation of Social Security as part of the New Deal, the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC)—helped restore confidence in the nation’s banking system coming out of the Great Depression. One could plausibly take major portions of FDR’s New Deal and substitute his name with President Obama’s.  The implementation of the $787-billion American Economic Recovery Act one month after Obama took office, coupled with his handling of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which sought to strengthen the financial sector by buying up the assets and equity from troubled banks, has clearly helped the nation avoid further financial disaster and put the economy on the path to recovery.

And finally, turning again to the FDR playbook, Obama assembled a team of wise men and women, formidable economic and business minds, whose decisions are having a lasting effect on the role of the corporate director. Preeminent among them was the choice of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff. Described as a veritable “influence machine,” within the Administration and Congress, the former Congressman from Obama’s home state of Illinois is known as a hard-charging, brutally candid, sometimes combative, acutely intelligent man who can get things done and knows the ways of the Capitol and the boardroom.

The Enforcers
Perhaps second only to Obama in terms of her influence on boards and corporate governance, career regulator Mary Schapiro heads up the 75-year-old SEC. Before the crisis, the agency’s very existence was in question: “Obsolete,” “out of touch,” and “behind the times” were just some of the many terms uttered by detractors. The Commission, under former chairman Christopher Cox, was pilloried for missing the Madoff scandal.

As former SEC chairman and Directorship 100 Hall of Famer, Arthur Levitt described her: “She has the skills, the intellect, and the character to be a superb SEC chair.” But Schapiro will face a new kind of challenge in the role, not just that of proving her own qualifications, but also instituting a significant remodeling of the SEC itself, as she works to bring it into the new regulatory era.

Moving swiftly to address regulatory concerns in the wake of the financial crisis, the SEC has rolled out a series of proposals that could embody the biggest change to the rules of the game for directors in some time. Schapiro, who is no stranger to the boardroom, having served on the boards of Duke Energy and Kraft Foods, has overseen proposed rule changes on proxy access, broker voting, say on pay, and new requirements for disclosure on executive compensation and director qualifications. It’s now up to her and fellow commissioners Kathleen Casey, Elisse Walter, Luis Aguilar, and Troy Paredes to determine the final regulations that emerge from the proposals.

Other key players Schapiro has brought into the SEC include Senior Advisor Kayla Gillan, Chief Accountant James Kroeker, and Director of Enforcement Robert Khuzami. Gillan was a founding board member of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and former general counsel to CalPERS. Kroeker joined the SEC as deputy chief accountant in 2007 from Deloitte and Touche where he had been a partner in the firm’s national accounting services group. Kroeker recently said that the proposed road map for the convergence of International Financial Reporting Standards,pushed to the back burner amid the larger issues of market reform, would be restored as another top priority. Khuzami is a former federal prosecutor, has pledged to improve the SEC’s enforcement performance by creating specialized units to provide “structure and resources for staff to ‘get smart’ about certain products, markets, regulatory regimes, practices and transactions.”

TARP Overseers
Another example of Obama’s preference for brains over politics was his reappointment of Sheila Bair to chair the FDIC. Another fiscally conservative Republican, on Bair’s watch alone this year, 94 banks have failed, creating a new challenge:  how to replenish the fund. Bair has also been an integral part of the team overseeing TARP. Neil Barofsky is a former New York assistant attorney general confirmed by the Senate in December as special inspector general. Dubbed the “TARP Cop,” his job is to figure out how and where the $700-billion TARP funds are spent, reporting directly to the President and providing updates to the Congressional Oversight Panel chaired by bankruptcy expert and Harvard Law School professor, Elizabeth Warren. COP’s first report, released in February, casti-  gated then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for his performance and lack of transparency, reporting that the Treasury Department  had overpaid by $78 billion for the assets it bought from banks.

Interestingly, while Obama sponsored and was a strong proponent of  “say on pay” legislation while a senator, since appointing Kenneth Feinberg special master of compensation, he has appeared unwilling to make the issue a top priority. Feinberg, who has immersed himself in some of the country’s most troublesome and high-profile cases, is considered a superb choice, both in terms of skill and temperament, by Capitol Hill insiders. His most noteworthy case was the 33 months of pro-bono work he did following the 2001 terrorist attacks to determine how much each victim would receive from the federal government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

Feinberg may in fact be perfectly suited for a job that most compensation specialists see as thankless, and possibly as a “no win” situation. As the Obama Administration’s comp expert, Feinberg was called on to monitor the compensation of executives in what were once some of America’s most prestigious corporations, now TARP recipients, including American International Group (AIG), Bank of America, Citibank, Chrysler, GMAC, and General Motors.

Fed to the Rescue
To prevent American capitalism from spiraling deeper into the abyss, nine months after President Obama made his first Cabinet announcement, he re-nominated Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman. The former Princeton economics professor was selected by Bush in 2005 to succeed Alan Greenspan. In 2008 after the market crashed, Bernanke invoked emergency powers, slashed interest rates, and spent trillions of dollars to right the financial system. Just last month, he declared the recession “likely over.” Though he seldom gives interviews, Bernanke is never far from the public eye and has been a stalwart in the transition between presidential administrations and in the effort to stem the economic slide.

When then President-elect Obama named his economics team, it included players who, like Bernanke, were already steeped in the crisis details, demonstrated a studied understanding of Depression-era economics, or some combination of both. Enter Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Chief White House Economic Advisor Lawrence H. Summers. Geithner, who is currently pushing legislation to provide more systematic regulation of financial institutions, including new limits on executive compensation, recently told one interviewer that he is optimistic major reforms will be passed.

Prior to his appointment replacing Henry Paulson, Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and part of the team central to the critical negotiations that resulted in Bear Stearns being tucked into JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch going to Bank of America, Lehman Bros. disappearing, and Citigroup and other struggling banks getting a lifeline.

Summers, the former Harvard University economist who became its president following his tenure as Treasury Secretary to President Clinton, is director of the Cabinet’s National Economic Council. The group was established in 1993 to coordinate and ensure that the President’s economic policy agenda is carried out.

Rounding out the team, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chief under Clinton, was selected to chair the president’s economic recovery advisory board. And Christina Romer, a former UC Berkeley economist, who administration sources suggest is well- regarded by both parties, chairs the Council of Economic Advisers. Her appointment was seen as a further triumph of brain over politics in Obama’s approach to talent recruitment.

Roger Ailes, Fox News

Sharon Allen, Deloitte & Touche

Herbert M. Allison Jr., Director

Gavin Anderson, GMI

Philip A. Armstrong, GCGF

Norman R. Augustine, Director

Stephen Bainbridge, UCLA

Maria Bartiromo, CNBC

David Batchelder, Relational Investors

Lucian A. Bebchuk, Harvard Law

Irv Becker, Hay Group

Beverly Behan, Hay Group

Richard Bennett, The Corporate Library

Robert S. Bennett, Skadden Arps

Dennis R. Beresford, U. of Georgia

Ethan Berman, RiskMetrics Group

Ben Bernanke, The Federal Reserve

John Biggs, Director

Leon Black, Apollo

Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs

Richard Blumenthal, State of Conn.

Magnus Bocker, Nasdaq OMX

John C. Bogle, Hall of Fame

Richard Breeden, Breeden Partners

Catherine L. Bromilow, PwC

Beth A. Brooke, E&Y

Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway

Peter Butler, Governance for Owners

Marshall Carter, NYSE Euronext

Martha Carter, RiskMetrics Group

John J. Castellani, Business Roundtable

William B. Chandler III, Chancery Court

Ram Charan, Charan Associates

Peter Clapman, Governance for Owners

John C. Coffee, Columbia Law School

Frederic W. Cook, Frederic W. Cook & Co.

J. Michael Cook, Director

Christopher Cox, SEC

Jim Cramer, TheStreet.com

Andrew Cuomo, State of New York

Kenneth Daly, NACD

Julie Hembrock Daum, Spencer Stuart

George L. Davis, Egon Zehnder Intl.

Stephen M. Davis, Millstein Center

James L. Dimon, JPMorgan

Samuel A. DiPiazza, Jr., PwC

Christopher Dodd, U.S. Senate

Amy Domini, Domini Social Investments

William H. Donaldson, Hall of Fame

Thomas J. Donohue, Chamber of Commerce

Ed Durkin, United Brotherhood of Carpenters

Theodore L. Dysart, Heidrick & Struggles

Jay Eisenhofer, Grant & Eisenhofer

Charles Elson, U. of Delaware

John Engler, NAM

Richard Ferlauto, AFSCME

Timothy Flynn, KPMG

Margaret “Peggy” Foran, Sara Lee

Cynthia M. Fornelli, CAQ

Barney Frank, U.S. Congress

William F. Galvin, State of Mass.

William W. George, Harvard Business School

Kayla Gillan, RiskMetrics Group

Robert J. Giuffra, Jr., Sullivan & Cromwell

Scott Goebel, Fidelity

Holly Gregory, Weil, Gotshal & Manges

Robert Greifeld, Nasdaq OMX

Joseph Grundfest, Stanford Law School

Steven Hall, Steven Hall & Partners

Robert Hallagan, Korn/Ferry Intl.

Laurence P. Hazell, Standard & Poor’s

Edward Herlihy, Wachtell Lipton

Robert Herz, FASB

John A. Hill, Putnam

Paul Hodgson, The Corporate Library

Christopher Hohn, TCI

Michele J. Hooper, Director

Anthony J. Horan, JP Morgan

Carl Icahn, Icahn Investments

Ray R. Irani, Occidental Petroleum

Edward Kangas, Director

Adam Kanzer, Domini Social Investments

Henry Keizer, KPMG

Donald Keough, Director

Joe Kernen, CNBC

Richard Ketchum, FINRA

Charles King, Korn/Ferry Intl.

Catherine Kinney, NYSE Euronext

Jannice L. Koors, Pearl Meyer & Partners

Richard H. Koppes, Jones Day

Henry Kravis, KKR

Frederick J. Krebs, ACC

John A. Krol, Director

Robert Kueppers, Deloitte & Touche

Arthur Levitt, Hall of Fame

Martin Lipton, Wachtell Lipton

Jay W. Lorsch, Harvard Business School

Joann Lublin, Wall Street Journal

Steve Mader, Korn/Ferry Intl.

Ken Marzion, CalPERS

Mary Pat McCarthy, KPMG

Bill McCollum, State of Florida

Robert McCormick, Glass Lewis

Blythe J. McGarvie, Director

William McGuinness, Fried Frank

Patrick McGurn, RiskMetrics Group

W. James McNerney, Jr. Boeing

James P. Melican, PGI

Pearl Meyer, Steven Hall & Partners

Bill Miller, Legg Mason

Ira Millstein, Hall of Fame

Nell Minow, The Corporate Library

Robert A.G. Monks, author, Corpocracy

Peter Montagnon, ABI

Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times

Anne Mulcahy, Xerox

Anne Mule, Sunoco

Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.

Alan Murray, Wall Street Journal

Jim Naughton, Corporate Governance Blog

Thomas Neff, Spencer Stuart

Duncan Niederauer, NYSE Euronext

Joseph Nocera, New York Times

Floyd Norris, New York Times

Mark Olson, PCAOB

James Owens, Caterpillar

Michael Oxley, Hall of Fame

William Patterson, CtW

Henry M. Paulson, Jr. U.S. Treasury

Harry Pearce, Director

Harvey L. Pitt, Kalorama Partners

Becky Quick, CNBC

Carl Quintanilla, CNBC

David Rubenstein, Carlyle Group

Paul Sarbanes, Hall of Fame

Charles E. Schumer, U.S. Senate

Stephen A. Schwarzman, Blackstone

Mary Shapiro, FINRA

Damon Silvers, AFL-CIO

David W. Smith, SCSGP

Michael Smith, AIG

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, Yale School of Management

Larry W. Sonsini, Wilson Sonsini

Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times

Myron T. Steele, Delaware Supreme Court

Leo E. Strine, Chancery Court

David N. Swinford, Pearl Meyer & Partners

John Thain, Merrill Lynch

Andrew Tuch, Corporate Governance Blog

James S. Turley, E&Y

E. Norman Veasey, Weil Gotshal & Manges

Stephen Wagner, Deloitte & Touche

Carol Ward, Kraft Foods

Henry Waxman, U.S. Congress

Ralph Whitworth, Relational Investors

John Wilcox, TIAA-CREF

Note: More than 100 individuals are named because some listings contain more than one person at the same company or in the same industry.

For the complete 2008 Directorship 100 article, click HERE.