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.

The change could help the stock prices of banks and insurers, but won’t necessarily eliminate their need to raise more capital.

Criticism of Financial Accounting Standard 157, which describes how such instruments must be accounted for at fair value, the FASB has proposed that preparers of financial statements can take into account expected cash flows when testing such securities for impairment whether they are classified as available for sale or as held to maturity, according to FW.

Under the new proposal, assets trading at low prices need not be treated as permanently impaired so losses on them can be included on comprehensive income rather than earnings.

“Regaining investor confidence during this global credit crisis requires both immediate action and a plan for long-term improvement in the accounting for financial instruments,” said FASB Chairman Robert Herz in a statement announcing the change posted to the board’s website. “By issuing these proposed [staff positions], the FASB is taking immediate steps to reduce complexity and make the accounting for these instruments easier to understand.”

The proposed change in impairment testing would not affect banks’ balance sheets, changes to net income are included in “tier one” capital. The new rule may influence regulators’ views of what they considered adequate.

Despite the G20 group of nations’ request to expedite changes, the accounting standard-setters said they will continue their projects as planned. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the Financial Accounting Services Board (FASB) are in no rush to fast-track initiatives to please the G20.

Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the IASB and his U.S. counterpart, Robert Herz, chairman of FASB, each addressed the G20’s requests to expedite changes. Tweedie noted that both the IASB and FASB will amend standards on consolidation of assets later next year, according to FW.

“These are very complicated projects,” said Tweedie. “If you rush them you make mistakes.”

Patricia Donoghue, a FASB project manager working on amending the standards for off-balance-sheet vehicles, told another panel at the conference that FASB is working as fast as it can on the assignment. “We think it’s possible to make progress by then,” said Donoghue. “What we don’t know is what interference we’ll have from other parties,” that could delay issuance of the amendments. Donoghue did not identify “other parties.”

Both the IASB and FASB defended the recent work of their boards on valuing assets in fractured markets. “I’m not sure there’s more to be done on illiquid markets,” Herz said. Herz eluded that what corporate managers and the G20 countries really want is a cookbook on fair-value accounting.

“We’re not going to give them a cookbook,” Herz told FW.

How is FASB funded and where does it derive its authority from?

Our funding changed under Sarbanes-Oxley. Previously, we received voluntary contributions from large auditing firms through the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and from companies. SOX put an end to that because there were concerns about conflicts of interest. We are now funded through an accounting support fee that mutual funds and public companies pay. That’s worked very well because it is a secure source of funding; it’s something we can depend on.

FASB sets standards for public, private, and nonprofit entities. For public companies, it’s really a delegated responsibility from the SEC. SOX provided that the SEC should designate a standard-setting body, and in turn, it formally assigned FASB to that role for public companies.

What was the impetus for a move toward a global accounting standard?

Before joining FASB, I was on the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). In 2002, we met with our friends in the IASB in Norwalk, Conn., where FASB is headquartered, and put together the Norwalk Agreement, which was a framework to work together to develop global accounting standards. Most of our major projects since then have been accomplished together with a mixed staff. We’re looking to produce common standards and to work together to identify common high-quality solutions.

How has it progressed and what is the outlook for IFRS?

Last year, the SEC lifted the requirement for reconciliation to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for foreign filers that use IFRS. That was step one. We look at this as a road map. At some point if there’s enough progress, the next set of issues is whether to allow U.S. companies to use IFRS and switch from GAAP.

The next step was for the SEC to put out a proposal on that, which it did in late August. That proposal, now in a comment period, would allow a limited group of major U.S. companies to begin voluntarily using IFRS as early as 2009, with a decision in 2011 whether to require the use of IFRS for all filers in 2014, 2015, or not until 2016.

To what extent is it a choice to move to a ‘principles-based’ from a ‘rules-based’ approach?

Our GAAP is much older and more mature and has much more detail and guidance. But there is a misunderstanding on this. Our system has principles, too, and not surprisingly, IFRS has some rules. There’s no doubt our accounting system has been influenced by our regulatory and legal systems, but IFRS reflects a need to have much broader application across the world. But it is not purely one or the other. There’s always been a sentiment in our country that every question should get an answer. We’re trying to move away from that.

What will be some of the biggest changes with the adoption of IFRS?

You have to train people differently…try to understand the principles and get the facts and apply judgment. It also requires changes by the regulators. It might be staggered, like [SOX Section] 404—big companies first. There is an issue of what to do with private companies. Should private companies move to IFRS and, if so, when? Should there be some kind of slimmeddown version of IFRS? It’s about two things: coming to a single set of standards, but also achieving a higher quality so there is improvement. Both sides need to adopt the advice that used to be given to the father of the bride—you’re gaining a sonin- law, not losing a daughter.

What could keep it from happening?

There are a variety of potential hurdles. Clearly, there are all the philosophical questions, which we have been talking about. Secondly, there is the question of IASB’s financing—to address that, they’ve been trying to put in place a fee structure that would provide some funding. Another challenge would concern the overall timeliness of our decisions and execution with respect to issues that we believe require prompt attention. We sometimes have moved quickly on issues, which may not always be possible on an international basis, so that will need to be addressed. All these matters are not only doable in principle, but frankly, we are satisfied that as we speak there’s progress being made on all these fronts.

There’s also constituent politics that needs to be dealt with, and while we believe that this is the right way to go to achieve high-quality standards across the globe—transparency for cross-border capital flows—there is a disproportionate cost depending on company size. The major international companies and auditors support it, and investors support it, as long as FASB is involved and remains independent, but some smaller companies say there might be little gain for the pain. That’s part of the issue.

There has been some controversy around fair-value accounting, in light of the financial meltdown. Give us your take on this situation.

It may feel like a new issue—certainly the credit crisis has placed a new light on the subject—but investors and companies should recognize that we have always had to mark down assets in down markets. The problem we have now is a market problem. We have many financial assets with little or no liquidity, and this is caused or exacerbated by the lack of transparency or infrastructure. I have a lot of sympathy for the very significant challenges in valuing assets in such conditions, but most investors have told us they support the use of fair value and appreciate the new disclosures relating to Level I, II, and III assets. Do markets overreact? Yes, absolutely. Yet it turned out, so far with hindsight, that the market has been a good predictor of problems. But the pending government “bailout” program to buy illiquid assets may change the whole dynamic, hopefully for the better.

What does the future hold for you and how have you viewed your time at the helm of FASB?

My term is five years. You can only do two terms. I’m going into my seventh year, so I will have served my full term in 2012. I would hope that my legacy is that I scored on three fronts: improvement, simplification, and convergence, and the trick is to try to do all three simultaneously.

I would hope that we have improved standards and that we have, or are now moving toward, simplification and convergence. The mission’s a great mission. It’s important to capital markets and to the economy. I would also add on a personal note that I meet all sorts of interesting people all over the world. It’s very satisfying.

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.

Theproposals would reduce the FASB’s size from seven to five members, and would give the chairman the power to decide whetheror not to place issues on the board’s agenda, according to Norris’s column.

“Thechanges would provide greater focus, and improve the speed of decision making,” Robert Denham, the chairman of the foundation, the parent group of boththe FASB and the Government Accounting Standards Board, told the New York Times.

 
Denham told the times that the proposed revisions would additionally involve changes in how the foundation’s trustees are chosen, and would also strengthen it to provide more oversight to the two accounting boards it oversees.

What’s more, FASB under the proposal would have to comprise one member from each of four backgrounds, including investing, auditing, preparing financial statements for a company, and academic accounting.