Board Membership

Many boards are the opposite of diverse. Many boards are run by a single person, often the CEO, who not coincidentally is also a strong personality. In many cases, the most important issues don't even get to the board level. Given the amount of luck in business and the sheer number of ways to fail, it's wise to build a business that is as resilient as possible. This means balancing strong-willed CEOs with foxy diverse boards.  

One key phrase will make all the difference: cognitive diversity. Hiring people of different sex, color, shape, and background is just signaling. Hiring people who don’t agree all the time is progress. You want a board that pushes back, that investigates, that is willing to go to the mat and lose in a fair fight. Governance is hard. In most cases of corporate meltdown, the board was the last to see the symptoms. Find the subtle symptoms now that can destroy your company later.

Improve meeting effectiveness. Use time well. Don’t wing it. Make sure board members know what they are responsible for — build a kanban board for them. Have a meeting structure and stick to it. Look into using a tool like Zeck to run your board.

David Siegel has served on over a dozen corporate boards and has taken the Harvard Business School's executive program on board membership. Most boards are more dysfunctional than people would like to admit, and they have little or no structure to their process. David can come in and play a balancing role on your board, bringing a Bayesian and black-swan perspective, encouraging experiments and helping face new challenges. This is especially important when selecting a new CEO. Studies have confirmed that CEO pay is strongly linked to board member pay more than to other CEOs. There are many biases that affect boards. David Siegel can help you bring out the best in your team and prepare for the unexpected. 

It starts with coaching, to experiment with whether you like working with David. Then, at some point it may be valuable to bring him onto the board to be part of the team at a higher level. This is true for start-ups as well as for mature companies.