From the editor.

A new survey of leadership styles by research firm Caliper Corp. suggests that women, inside and outside finance, are creating a new paradigm--more consensual, more inclusive and perhaps more fitting to today's workplace. Two executives from Caliper detail their findings in the first part of our cover story. In the second part, Managing Editor Ellen M. Heffes talks to noted writer Marcus Buckingham, whose central tenet about leadership is confined to one word: clarity.

Demographic trends are creating a huge challenge for companies hoping to attract and retain top talent, as Baby Boomer managers retire. Managing Editor Ellen M. Heffes spoke to a couple of experts about the critical issues that are emerging, and interviewed Robert Darretta, the CFO of Johnson & Johnson, about the way J & J goes about developing its next generation of finance leaders.

Revenue recognition has been a sticky issue for many years, and a longstanding item on the Financial Accounting Standards Board docket. Many accountants and executives think a comprehensive solution to revenue recognition is necessary, writes Cheryl Graziano of Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF), but FASB's contemplated asset-and-liability approach represents a dramatic shift from current practices that will impact preparers, users and auditors of financial statements.

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Just how well are companies reporting corporate perks like personal travel or club memberships? Not well in many cases, according to John C. Partigan, a partner with the law firm of Nixon Peabody who examined 2005 proxy statements from the 100 largest public companies. But Partigan finds that many corporations have accepted the challenge of better transparency, and are making more voluntary disclosures.

Enterprise risk management (ERM) has been evolving for many years, as Tillinghast's ERM practice leader, Prakash Shimpi, describes. He advocates (and details) a unifying framework that can be used to articulate risks consistently across an organization and evaluate alternative capital structures--comprising equity, debt, insurance and hedging--to bear those risks.

Best practices benchmarking is a process that goes beyond just comparing yourself to your competition: it assesses your individual practices against companies that are truly tops in those areas. Richard T. Roth, research director at The Hackett Group, talks about the value of bench-marking and provides some statistics about benchmarking in finance.

We profile the two new FEI chairs for 2005-6, Robert Walker in the U.S. and Thomas L. Evans in Canada. Both are very seasoned financial executives who have impressed others in FEI with their abilities and dedication.

In an interview, FEI Canada's CFO of the Year, Claude Mongeau, describes to writer Ramona Dzinkowski a situation that's highly unusual in North America: privatization. Mongeau, the finance chief of Canadian National railways, relates how CN went from being the worst North American railroad in terms of financial metrics to perhaps the best in less than a decade.

The special report on corporate social responsibility (CSR) looks at an issue that has been catapulted into the headlines this spring by recent actions by giants such as General Electric and JPMorgan Chase. It's a subject that makes some uneasy, yet it's been drawing increasing attention from institutional investors. Financial executives charged with appealing to investors, yet financing such programs, need to decide how fast the CSR train is moving--and if their companies aren't on it, if they want to hop on board.