Key Agreed Principles to Strengthen Corporate Governance For U.S. Publicly Traded Companies

The Key Agreed Principles to Strengthen Corporate Governance for U.S. Publicly Traded Companies, published by NACD, are a set of principles intended to guide corporate leaders, and are the cumulative effort of many organizations and individuals to find a truly shared set of ideas to improve the internal functioning of America’s boardrooms.

Legitimate concerns arise, however, about the overly prescriptive use of best practice recommendations by some proponents, without recognition that different practices may make sense for different boards and at different times given the circumstances and culture of a board and the needs of the company.

In an effort to recognize significant areas of common agreement and interest and to move beyond highly prescriptive and rigid recommendations of best practice for publicly traded companies, NACD puts forth the following key principles to strengthen corporate governance—key principles that we believe most companies, boards, shareholders and shareholder groups will also support.

These Key Agreed Principles reflect the distillation and articulation of fundamental principles-based aspects of governance on which there appears to be broad consensus. they are intended to describe the current baseline consensus and thereby to help improve the quality of discussion and debate about governance issues that have not yet gained consensus.