John Rigas Founded Adelphia Communications Corporation

The Board of Directors consisted primarily of Gerry Wiegert, John Pope, and Barry Rosengrant. Gerry was the President, so it was typical for him to be a part of the board. John Pope was a financial consultant; therefore, he was adequate to be the financially literate person on the board. Barry was in real estate, but he was a consultant of Vector Car which gave him some knowledge of the company. Dan Harnett and George Fencl were also a part of the board for some point of time; they also had adequate knowledge to be capable additions to the board with their knowledge of law and

As a publicly-traded corporation, Adelphia, Inc. was one of the largest providers of cable services in the United States. After the company went public, it was learned that the company had materially

     In 1943, when Jack Morgan died, Thomas Lamont became the chairman of the company. This marked the first time since 1864 that a Morgan had not managed the firm.

Bob did a really good job in selecting the outside talent to represent on the advisory board. Bob knew that the family owned businesses had their own challenges so he chose Barry Ready, President of Readymade Office Systems, to join the Board because of the similarities between the two businesses. Bob also brought in functional experts Dick Crandall (finance) and Jim Carter (sales and marketing). Later, Bob added Peggy Thomas to bring diversity to the board and Mark Anderson, COO of Portland Timber, because of his real estate expertise.

We didn’t find that any of the board members were employed with the company in the past and interlocking directorship is not found neither. There is three female board members which is very good number taking the highest number of females in the board

Adelphia is the 6th biggest cable television provider in the United States and, with various subsidiaries, gives services of cable television and local telephone service to customers in 32 states and Puerto Rico. Adelphia means "brothers" in Greek. It used to be one of America's largest cable companies. John Rigas established the company and served as CEO and chairman. John's son Tim was CFO, and Tim's brothers, Michael, and James were Vice Presidents. All four were council members, along with John's son-in-law Peter Venetis. The Rigases also had 100% possession of class B super-voting shares, which granted the family majority voting rights.

Joshua Kennon (2007), stated that “The board of directors is the highest governing authority within the management structure at any publicly traded company and is usually made up of the directors who are elected for a specific number of years by the shareholders”. According to Wikipedia,” A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization”.

To make matters worse, Nortel’s Board of administrators failed to have one member that had monetary experience. The twelve-member board was freelance of Nortel, however, most of the members had alternative directorships. This created it troublesome for them to

The cable provider would purchase 50 percent of Store Communications Inc., which increased the number of subscribers to over 2 million. At this point in time the company was recognized as one of the largest cable providers in the nation. The company would continue to add subscribers as they acquire Maclean Hunter’s U.S. cable operations, adding 550,000 customers and becoming the third largest cable operator in the United States with approximately 3.3 million customers in 1994. A year later they continued to add subscribers at an alarming rate when they announced the acquisition of E.W. Scripps cable systems, adding 800,000 subscribers and bringing Comcast’s customer total to 4.3 million. In another effort to add more subscribers in 2000 with the acquisition of Lenfest Communications, Inc., the company is able to add approximately 1.3 million cable subscribers. While adding subscribers is important to the business plan, Comcast was always looking for ways to appeal to their customers: specifically, the ones who enjoyed watching sports. So along with entrepreneur and owner

According to Stafford and Heilprin, “American Cable Communications (ACC) was one of the largest cable operators in the United States (AirThread Case).” ACC serviced roughly 24.1 million video subscribers, 13.2 million high-speed internet subscribers, and 4.6 million landline telephony subscribers. In 2007, ACC saw revenues of $30.9 billion and had net income equaling $2.6 billion. In order to adapt to the changes in the industry, ACC started aggressively acquiring smaller companies, which resulted in huge customer growth and the development of, “a strong corporate finance team with significant acumen in identifying, valuing, structuring, and executing corporate control transaction (AirThread Case).” That being said, ACC has set its sights on yet another company--AirThread Connections--with the expectation of further revenue growth and customer acquisition and retention.

The executives are accountable to the board of directors. Instead of protecting the investors, the board enticed the culture of financial fraud in the company for selfish gains. It failed in its duties in keeping the executives in check.

According to Milton Friedman, "stockholders are the owners of the corporation, and hence corporate profits belong to the stockholders. Managers…have a moral obligation to manage the firm in the interest of the stockholders" (Friedman 45). Adelphia was managed in such a way that it was not in the stockholder's interest, in fact, it was only managed in the interest of the Rigas family. It is wrong to harm the stockholders because they have entrusted the company with their money with an expected return and maybe an

The Board of the Company consists of 11 (eleven) Independent Directors and 2 (two) Inside Directors. They have expertise in the areas of business, finance, law, audit and public companies.

The board consisted of the leaders of their own fields. It included physicians, lawyers, politicians and some of the former CEOs of airline industry. The board was relatively new and the most severe member had been there for four years. The risk management was the major issue which attracted most attention of the board and they dedicated more time on attention n risk management since the financial collapse.

The Board and its Committees did not function in a way that made it likely that they would notice red flags. The outside Directors had little or no involvement in the Company’ s business other than through attendance at Board meetings. Nearly all of the Directors were legacies of companies that WorldCom, under Ebbers’ leadership, had acquired. They had ceded leadership to Ebbers when their