If you want to understand corporate governance, there are three books you absolutely must read: A Weekend with Warren Buffett and Other Shareholder Meeting Adventures takes an amusing look at the author's journey to dozens of annual meetings, which leads him to the conclusion that shareholder democracy is basically a myth. The second is John Bogle's The Battle For the Soul of Capitalism.

Then there is Allan Murray's Revolt in the Boardroom. This book looks at the changing face of corporate governance: the era of the imperial CEO is essentially over, boards have greater responsibilities and, at last, America's largest public companies are being forced to pay attention to their owners.

Murray has composed an exciting narrative, drawing on several of the better-known boardroom brawls that have occurred in the past few years: corporate espionage at Hewlett-Packard, Spitzer's investigation of AIG that led to the ousting of the company's long-time CEO, and the relatively minor extramarital affair at Boeing that somehow led to the firing of that company's CEO.

But Murray manages to avoid getting too bogged down with anecdotes. Interviews with the vice president of Institutional Shareholder Services and others who are shaping the new corporate establishment shed light on how much corporate America really is changing.

Get is used on Amazon for less than $10.

There are two kinds of CEOs: innovators -- who come up with growth ideas -- and janitors -- who cut costs and instill discipline. There are times when it's best to invest in an innovator, and others when a janitor generates superior shareholder returns. What does this mean for stocks? Potential buys include Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA), Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), and American International Group, Inc. (NYSE: AIG), and potential holds include Hewlett-Packard Co. (NASDAQ: HPQ), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), and Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL).

This thought came to mind after reading an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray's new book -- Revolt in the Boardroom: The New Rules of Power in Corporate America. It's a measure of his clout that he got the front page [subscription required] -- albeit of the Saturday edition. Murray's argument is that "boring" CEOs are now on the rise "in the wake of ... Enron" (a hackneyed expression that should be banned from the journalistic lexicon).

Following journalistic convention, Murray extrapolates a trend from three cases. He argues that boards have appointed "boring" CEOs -- I call them janitors since they are the executive equivalent of a clean up crew that comes in after a rock concert -- to avoid their predecessors' scandals. He cites the "boring" examples of Jim McNerney at Boeing, Martin Sullivan at AIG, and Mark Hurd at HP. They can boost the stock price for a while by cutting excess cost and instilling process discipline.

But they often fall down when it comes to generating revenue growth ideas. This is where investors can benefit from an innovator CEO -- the archetype of which is Apple's Steve Jobs. For investors there are two problems with such innovators: