- [Instructor] Hey everyone. Welcome to the next lesson. This module, we're gonna be looking at mapping people and power. So the aims of this section are to gain a basic understanding of corporate hierarchies and to gain a basic understanding of some of the key corporate roles and what they involve. Later on through this module, we're gonna be looking at kind of campaign examples of where directors or people with a lot of power, like shareholders, have been targeted effectively. But the focus of this lesson now is just to really introduce those different roles within a kind of company structure. 

So, yeah, different companies, different industries, different countries, they'll all have different names for people at the top, top dogs like top of the hierarchy. But this section specifically focuses on the roles of directors, chief executive officers, and others as power holders. But just a reminder about the last lesson that the power of these people has to be in context of who the ultimate owners of a company are, as well as the kind of the board members and the shareholders, which we're gonna introduce a lot more in detail in the account section. 

Okay, so board members. You probably all seen movies where there's these fancy big boardrooms, it has chairs, and it's City of London. It's in a tower block and people are getting sacked and there's backstabbing. It's really exciting. I'm sure a lot of boards are not that exciting, but they are essential to the functioning of a company. So board members in general are elected by shareholders, unless the company has a structure that doesn't have shareholders. It will include executive directors. So these are people that are kind of hands-on. They've got managerial responsibility, kind of daily way or non-executive directors. So maybe they don't have a kind of daily responsibility or role in the company in that way. They tend to be run by a chairperson. And the general roles of the board are to monitor the management team and to advocate for the shareholder interests. So if you're not doing your job properly you might get sacked in one of these meetings, for example. 

Okay, so the chairperson is responsible for managing the board. They're elected by the board of directors. And generally there'll be very hands-on. So they'll be in communication with the chief execs and staff. They'll input into strategy, maybe they'll represent the company. So this guy here, Charles Holiday, is the chairman of Shell and he's also been the chairman of Bank of America and a former chief executive officer of DuPont. So you'll kind of learn as you map out different people in different companies, how they kind of move across different industries that have similar levels of power in the world. 

Okay, so our very favorite, Jeff Bezos. The very famous CEO of Amazon looking very happy here as a billionaire. That's profited from the pandemic. Anyway, so, yes, chief executive officer. They're the kind of like the person that's responsible for the operations of the corporation. They're sometimes, but not always, but the very often a founder or an owner or they're major shareholders. They might have some kind of big and financial investment in the kind of performance of their company. So they'll report to the chairman and the board of directors. And again, they can have different names. So they might be called the president. They might be the managing director. All depends how the company is structured. And sometimes, they might also be the chairman themselves. 

So then we have the chief operations officer. So this is kind of generally the person second in command. They'll be focused on getting stuff done, implementing plans, overseeing administration, and the different kind of functional operations of the business, they'll handle kind of internal affairs. And they might have specific technical knowledge in the field. For example, in mining, they might've, used to be an engineer, for example. And again, all these companies will call people different names, but not every company will have a chief operations officer many just have groups of directors managing different departments. So Tim Cook here is a former chief operations officer for Apple, so he was kind of Steve Job's secondhand man. 

Okay, and then you have your chief financial officer. So this tends to be underneath the CEO, but they're really high ranking financial officials. So they really influence the financial decisions of the company. And yeah, very kind of vital role in the company's strategic initiatives and decisions. So this guy here is the chief financial officer for Facebook, for example. And I'm sure he's filthy rich, but he doesn't look very happy in this picture. So, yeah, these people were tend to have quite a lot of power and financial decision-making responsibility. So, yeah, there's lots of other key people. Corporations like this picture, I think it's from the G4S website. They might have subsidiaries and offices like all over the world. So they might have many kind of regional directors and senior managers in different countries that your campaign could potentially focus on if that was strategic for you. People can often be found on local websites or they might only be found on platforms such as LinkedIn, which I'm gonna talk about a bit later. So, yeah, there's going to be very likely to be specific managers for specific projects as well. So it might be that the chief executive officer cares about, for example, prison expansion, but it might be that some kind of regional director or the director of prison expansion or something, I'm just making up, might be the one that you're more likely to focus on. So, again, it's useful to understand the kind of hierarchy globally. So, yeah, kind of questions to leave you with. There's why is it useful to know the key people in the company and how can a campaign use this information? 

We're gonna be exploring these questions in a lot more detail in the next few lessons.