The nation’s third-largest pizza company has given up its quest to find a new owner . Papa Johns wasn’t satisfied with offers from private equity companies, reports Reuters . As a result, it has opted to look for an investor instead. The news surprised investors, who quickly punished the company. Papa John’s stock fell more than 8% Friday in mid-morning trading. Papa Johns has been struggling for awhile, at one time blaming the NFL’s National Anthem controversy for its problems...

The chief executive officer and chairman of consulting and outsourcing giant Accenture, Pierre Nanterme, is stepping down due to health reasons, the company announced in a statement released on Friday. Nanterme was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016. He took the helm at Accenture in 2011...

Women hold just over 10% of board seats at Fortune 500 companies, according to Catalyst Inc. Chief executives, gathered at Fortune ’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on Tuesday spoke to a room of women interested in joining a board—and what that entails. The ...

Eddie Lampert, the chairman and former CEO of Sears (who some blame for the retailer’s current financial woes), wants to buy the embattled chain for $4.6 billion.

ESL Investments, Lampert’s hedge fund, said it had submitted the bid to the bankruptcy court in a statement Thursday...

A group called European Women on Boards last week released its first-ever gender diversity index and came to this conclusion: France, far and away, has by its measure the highest share of women on company boards at 44.2%. The index assessed gender representation at the 200 largest European listed companies in nine nations—Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K—in an effort to identify best practices...

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Dollar Tree’s (dltr) $9 billion acquisition of Family Dollar in 2015 after a knock-down-drag-out fight with Dollar General (dg) has turned into a big weight on its results as fixing the damaged chain is proving to be harder than expected...

On Oct. 1 , when General Electric announced it had fired John Flannery, its CEO of just 14 months, one of the few people not at all shocked by the news was Nelson Peltz, the legendary activist investor. Flannery’s abrupt dismissal surprised even Wall Street analysts who obsessively follow the tarnished conglomerate...

J. Crew Group Inc. CEO James Brett is stepping down after reaching an agreement with the clothing store chain’s board of directors, the company announced.

His tenure as chief executive was brief. He replaced Mickey Drexler last summer amid declining sales and onerous debt payments...

Elon Musk has founded an interesting variety of companies since dropping out of the physics PhD program at Stanford. In the 1990s, he was among the first to see how the Internet could be used to distribute useful information (at Zip2) and pay for online sales (at PayPal). By the turn of the century, his vision was expanding and he founded SpaceX and Tesla, seeing a future with commercial spaceflights and electric cars. It’s been a long and not always smooth journey for those two companies...

Tesla’s third-largest shareholder believes in what Elon Musk is doing at the company. And it’s willing to put up more cash if the car maker’s co-founder asks for it...

It’s not the robots that are coming for American jobs. It’s not the immigrants. It’s not evil offshoring CEOs either. It’s the shareholders...

As we have in the past, Fortune collaborated with our partner Korn Ferry Hay Group on this survey of corporate reputations. We began with a universe of about 1,500 candidates: the 1,000 largest U.S. companies ranked by revenue, along with non-U.S. companies in Fortune’s Global 500 database that have revenues of $10 billion or more...

The Conference Board’s CEO pay study—the most comprehensive annual review of pay practices—comes out Thursday. Fortune ‘s email newsletter CEO Daily got an exclusive early look...

Papa John’s ugly year of turmoil may finally bring shareholders some welcome news: Trian Fund Management , a hedge fund led by activist investor Nelson Peltz, is evaluating a takeover of the pizza chain , the Wall Street Journal reports. The news caused Papa John’s stock to surge 12% late Monday. Other parties, including companies and private-equity funds, have also expressed interest in buying Papa John’s, the Journal said...

Barnes & Noble is once again looking at so-called strategic alternatives for its business including a possible sale of the languishing bookstore chain. Barnes & Noble said on Wednesday it was considering selling itself after receiving interest from multiple parties, including the company’s executive chairman and top shareholder, Leonard Riggio, the man who turned what had been a single Manhattan store into the largest U.S. bookstore chain...

It always pays to have a veteran’s perspective.

Attendees of Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif. got just that on Tuesday as four experienced corporate directors shared lessons they’ve learned from years at the boardroom table...

Just over a year after Signet Jewelers’ CEO and key executives were accused of sexual harassment, the company has achieved gender parity on its board of directors under a female chief. And that diversity is helping Signet work through its challenges ever faster. “We now have 50% women on our board,” Signet CEO Virginia “Gina” Drosos said during Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in...

As executives, being able to look at our organizations objectively and dispassionately is one of the most important skills we must possess to succeed. Yet all too often when we look in the mirror and examine our business strategy and performance, we don’t quite see what is really there...

Investors are holding Mark Zuckerberg’s feet to the fire on the heels of a disappointing earnings report that caused shares to crater in after-hour trading Wednesday, with one drawing up a proposal that the social media site’s founder be removed as chairman...

A special committee of Papa John’s Board of Directors has decided to kick founder John Schnatter out of his office at the company’s headquarters in Louisville, Ky., the board announced in a statement Sunday. The move comes after Schnatter resigned after using racist language during a conference call...

By Claire Zillman 6:30 AM EDT By the time Jennifer Tejada and ­Jennifer Hyman joined the board of Estée Lauder in April, both were accustomed to being deluged with opportunities to claim a seat at the boardroom table. “Quite a few ­companies have approached me,” says Hyman, CEO of wardrobe-­rental startup Rent the Runway. Tejada, CEO of cloud-computing company PagerDuty, recalls fielding inbound inquiries multiple times a month. “Sometimes multiple times a week,” she says.

Though it seems unlikely, Tim Cook and Indira Jaising have something in common besides membership in Fortune’s 2018 ranking of the World’s Greatest Leaders. Cook (No. 14) is the wealthy CEO of Apple, the most valuable publicly traded company on earth; Jaising (No. 20) is an Indian lawyer who cofounded an NGO called Lawyers Collective, which promotes human rights issues. Yet they share this trait: Both have multiplied their organizations’ effectiveness by harnessing the power of unbundling.

London Stock Exchange Group hired Goldman Sachs Group ’s David Schwimmer to run the 217-year-old bourse, ending a months-long search for a CEO by appointing another investment banker. He will join the group on Aug. 1 following a 20-year career at Goldman Sachs (gs) , the exchange said in a statement on Friday. Schwimmer, 49, takes up one of the most high-profile jobs in the City of London and is currently based in New York...

Walt Disney’s shareholders have refused to endorse the pay increase of CEO Bob Iger. It’s an unprecedented move, though largely symbolic. Meanwhile, Tesla’s shareholders will later this month vote on the huge compensation deal for Elon Musk that could see the CEO rake in billions if the firm hits a series of valuation targets...