It's fine to claim "the buck stops at the board/CEO and they should be responsible", but claiming that all directors are directly responsible, just because they're on the board is a stretch. If that counts as "directly" responsible, what type of "responsible" is associated with explicitly ordering/approving the decision?
So if the BoD is supposed to oversee the executives to ensure that Nestles operations are maximizing shareholder holder returns, and if through the course of overseeing management, Nestle decides to attempt a new strategy for customer retention (sugar addiction), which most certainly was at least mentioned to the board in passing during some update meeting, and if the board did not shut down the initiative because it’s good for shareholder returns (addicted customers are customers for life), then in some ways they are responsible for the company’s actions.
>if through the course of overseeing management, Nestle decides to attempt a new strategy for customer retention (sugar addiction), which most certainly was at least mentioned to the board in passing during some update meeting, and if the board did not shut down the initiative
1. those are a lot of "if"s
2. it's not necessary that the explicit decision to add sugars made it all the way up to the board. That could be due to banal (eg. board of directors doesn't care about every minutiae of how the business) or nefarious reasons (ie. providing plausible deniability).
>then in some ways they are responsible for the company’s actions
To be clear, I'm not claiming they should be left off the hook entirely, just that claiming they're "directly" responsible doesn't make much sense. From my original comment:
>It's fine to claim "the buck stops at the board/CEO and they should be responsible"
https://www.nestle.com/investors/corporate-governance/manage...
Directors at Nestlé and their other associations:
- Paul Bulcke: L'Oréal, Roche Holding
- U. Mark Schneider: None listed
- Henri de Castries: HSBC Holdings, Saint-Gobain
- Dick Boer: None listed
- Kimberly A. Ross: PQ Group Holdings, Chubb Ltd
- Dinesh Paliwal: Bristol Myers Squibb, Raytheon Technologies
- Patrick Aebischer: Lonza Group, Logitech
- Kasper Rorsted: Siemens AG, Bertelsmann
- Lindiwe Majele Sibanda: None listed
- Anna Richell: None listed
- Eva Cheng: None listed
- Renato Fassbind: Swiss Re, Kühne+Nagel International