Corporate Title - Variations

Variations

There are considerable variations in the responsibilities of the titles.

Within the corporate office or corporate center of a company, some companies have a Chairman and CEO as the top ranking executive, while the number two is the President and COO; other companies have a President and CEO but no official deputy. Typically, C-level managers are "higher" than Vice Presidents, although many times a C-level officer may also hold a vice president title, such as Executive Vice President and CFO. The board of directors is technically not part of management itself, although its chairman may be considered part of the corporate office if he or she is an executive chairman.

A corporation often consists of different businesses, whose senior executives report directly to the CEO or COO. If organized as a division then the top manager is often known as an Executive Vice President (for example, Todd Bradley who heads the Personal Systems Group in Hewlett Packard). If that business is a subsidiary which has considerably more independence then the title might be known as Chairman and CEO (for example, Philip I. Kent of Turner Broadcasting System in Time Warner).

In some European Union, and in some Asian countries, there are two separate boards, one executive board for the day-to-day business and one supervisory board for control purposes (elected by the shareholders). In these countries, the CEO presides over the executive board and the chairman presides over the supervisory board, and these two roles will always be held by different people. This ensures a distinction between management by the executive board and governance by the supervisory board. This allows for clear lines of authority seemingly. There is a strong parallel here with the structure of government, which tends to separate the political cabinet from the management civil service. In the United States, the board of directors (elected by the shareholders) is often equivalent to the European/Asian supervisory board. The executive board's counterpart in the United States may often be known as the operating committee (J.P. Morgan and Chase), management committee (Goldman Sachs), executive committee (Lehman Brothers), or executive council (Hewlett-Packard), composed of the division/subsidiary heads and C-level officers that report directly to the CEO.