What to Ask Your Company’s Auditors [Harvard Business Review]

When the world’s largest financial institutions had to be rescued from insolvency in 2008 by massive injections of governmental assistance, many blamed corporate boards for a lack of oversight. This was a problem we had supposedly solved nearly a decade ago, when blatant failures of corporate governance (remember Enron?) prompted Congress to pass the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Business Travel With Eyeshades and Flashlights [Harvard Business Review]

Travel can be the bane of an otherwise well-organized life. It can disturb your routine, rob you of sleep, mess up your diet. Or not. In the sixth of a series of posts on personal productivity, Bob Pozen, chairman emeritus of MFS Investment Management and a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, tells HBR’s Justin Fox about his approach to travel. (The original conversation this series was based on took place in May; so when Pozen says “last week,” he means a while ago.)

Make Meetings Work: Fight the PowerPoint [Harvard Business Review]

PowerPoint overload! Hundred-twenty-minute snoozefests! Inconclusive conclusions! We all know how meetings can go wrong. In this fifth in a series of posts on personal productivity, Bob Pozen, chairman emeritus of MFS Investment Management and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, tells HBR’s Justin Fox how to structure meetings that don’t waste anybody’s time.

What Not to Spend Your Time On [Harvard Business Review]

Fourth in a series of conversations on personal productivity between Bob Pozen and Justin Fox. Pozen is a lawyer, and he started out in a legal career: law professor at Georgetown and NYU, associate general counsel at the SEC, partner at a D.C. law firm, general counsel at Fidelity Investments. Then, in 1997, Fidelity chairman Edward C. Johnson put Pozen in charge of Fidelity’s giant mutual fund arm, Fidelity Management & Research Co. Since then, Pozen has developed some pretty clear ideas about how top executives should do their jobs.

How to Be a Speed Writer [Harvard Business Review]

The third in a series of conversations on personal productivity between Bob Pozen and Justin Fox. The first is on Pozen’s daily routine; the second is about speed reading. Pozen is also a speedy writer — of op-eds, HBR articles, a mutual-fund industry textbook now headed into its third edition, and an acclaimed 457-page account of the financial crisis and its causes, Too Big To Save? How to Fix the US Financial System, which was published late in 2009.