High Performance Boards

Improving and Energizing your Governance

Didier Cossin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119615651
• eBook ISBN: 9781119615699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Corporate Governance
• Index: Business

A comprehensive guide to transforming boards and achieving best-practice governance in any organisation.

When practising good governance, the board is the vital driver of organizational success, while fostering positive social impact and economic value creation. At all levels, executives around the world are faced with complexities rising from disruptive business models, new technologies, socio-economic changes, shifting political circumstances, and an array of other sources. High Performance Boards is the comprehensive manual for attaining best-in-class governance, offering pragmatic guidance on improving board quality, accountability, and performance.

This authoritative volume identifies the four dimensions, or pillars, which are crucial for establishing and maintaining best-practice boards: the people involved, the information architecture, the structures and processes, and the group dynamics and culture of governance. This methodology can be applied to any board in the world, corporate or non-profit organization, regardless of size, sector, industry, or context. Readers are introduced to a fictitious senior board member – an amalgamation of board members from well-known organisations – and follow her as she successfully handles real-life challenges with effective governance. Drawn from the author's 20 years of practice and confidential work with boards across the world, this book:

• Demonstrates how high-performance boards innovate and refine their practices
• Discusses examples of board failures and challenges, including case studies from both for-profit and non-profit organisations including international organizations and state-owned agencies or even ministries
• Provides a proven framework to create best-in-class governance
• Includes a companion website featuring tools for board assessment and board practice

High Performance Boards has inspired more than 3000 board members around the world. This book is essential reading for professionals and managers interested in governance and board members, senior managers, investors, lawyers, and students of governance.

PART I
The Four Pillars of Board Effectiveness

Joanne Marker and Board Service

October 2018: At age 69, Joanne Marker had been a senior independent director for over 20 years on the boards of many different companies and public organisations.

The previous year, Joanne had taken early retirement from her job as head of global marketing at Connect, a major US telecommunications company, where she had worked for more than two decades. Hers had been a rewarding and challenging career, of which she was proud.

Joanne now derived a different kind of satisfaction from her board service at three very different companies: Connect, international pharmaceutical company Ziogen, and engineering multinational SNB. In recent months a few other organisations had extended invitations, and she was currently evaluating each of them.

One morning, an email from her nephew Thorsten popped up on her screen.

Dear Aunt Joanne,

Exciting news! I just received an invitation to be on the board of Kloetzel & Brothers! First board meeting is next month. I wanted to pick the brain of my favorite board member! Can I take you to lunch at Mario's when you're in town next week?

Yours,

Thorsten

Thorsten was an ambitious, capable, and educated young man working in investment banking on Wall Street. Joanne had no doubt that he would make a fine board director; his knowledge of the financial markets and banking regulation would certainly be helpful to Kloetzel, a global financial services company. He was bright, energetic, and hardworking – and from what she had heard, had earned a reputation in banking as a name to watch. Still, she found herself remembering a few incidents that made her wonder whether he had the maturity and self-possession needed for boardroom discussions. She checked her calendar and emailed Thorsten, confirming the lunch.

***

Joanne cast her mind back to a chilly afternoon in March 1992. She had been in her office thinking about how to improve a distribution partnership for WeCare, the multinational consumer goods company she worked for at the time, when her phone rang.

It was her old friend from business school, Burt Goodman, who was now a mover and shaker at GCD, a major consulting firm. Goodman invited Joanne to join him for the Henry Street Settlement dinner in New York City. ‘I'm just not cut out for big gala events, Burt’, she had protested.

‘Oh come on, it will be good for you’, Goodman said. ‘Sometimes even an MBA and over 20 years of experience in a major multinational can't match the magic of one lucky dinner conversation’. So Joanne decided to go.

At the dinner, she was seated next to Jordan ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: The Four Pillars of Board Effectiveness
• Part II: Board Failures and Challenges
• Part III: Board Best Practices
• Joanne Marker and Board Values at Comfre
• Joanne Marker Confronts Failing Board Culture
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement