On Boards Podcast

The role of legal counsel for organizations and boards varies wildly depending on the situation, but in all instances provides a valuable resource for companies at every stage of evolution.

In the episode, Eric Dale - who has served as a legal advisor in many capacities for a wide range of companies – discussed the important, often critical. Role that a company's legal advisor can plan.

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Quotes

The General Counsel role, whether it's as inside or outside counsel, can add a tremendous amount of value as a company is making the transition from founder-owned and operated to founder significantly owned and operated, but having third-party capital and new partners in the business.

Nielsen is New York Stock Exchange company and while I was there while it operated in about 106 countries, had approximately 47,000 employees and its peak enterprise value was approximately $28 billion. My role included making sure that items that fell into my purview - legal, risk, compliance etc. to the extent they were worthy of getting on the board agenda, got on the board agenda.

I don't want your listeners to think that when a company is smaller, there is materially less formality. I would rather leave them with the idea that as companies get bigger, both the materiality of the issues, the magnitude of the issues, and often, although not always, the complexity of the issues are such that it just requires an additional layer of activity and oversight.

Board minutes like contracts will largely be reviewed with the benefit of hindsight, so no one is looking at them unless and until there's a problem. And once there's a problem, if they're inconsistent or if they provide fodder for misinterpretation or multiple interpretations, you run litigation risk.

Big Ideas/Thoughts

As companies scale, generally the role of the board becomes more formal. I think that's actually a good word and a good concept to use. There is certainly regular communication with the board or individual board members between board meetings in all companies with which I've been involved.

But when you're dealing with a large multinational company, there are just a significant number of, not only issues, but things to consider whether it's the global nature of the business, NASDAQ or New York Exchange rules, and a variety of other issues that can have a major impact.

For instance, one of the issues we were always focused on was antitrust. Nielsen was a very big player in the markets that it served. It was also a very transactionally oriented business, regularly buying and selling companies, and in doing that analysis there's always an antitrust or a competition analysis that had to be undertaken. The board cared deeply about that, and some of those issues, if not existential, could certainly be very material to the ongoing business and operations. The formality in terms of making sure every "t" was crossed and "i" was dotted was critical to make sure that the board got the best advice that it could in order to make the decisions that it ultimately needed to be made.

Outside GC

My own view, and again, listeners need to think about this through the lens through which I'm speaking - I don't see a lot of downside to it having an attorney in the room who can call balls and strikes or make sure things stay within the appropriate lanes, and who can put minutes together that will reflect what minutes ought to reflect.

Bankwell Financial Group

When I got involved, it was a private $250 million bank, kind of a community bank. We've grown since I've served on the Board to about 10 or 11 times, or just under $3 billion now.

The banking business is a highly regulated, highly complex business. The fundamental business of taking in money at X and loaning money out at X plus it is not that complicated, but the machinations that go into that are very complicated.

For our bank there are two regulatory bodies. One is NASDAQ but in addition regulated businesses like banks are audited by their regulators very frequently, usually annually, sometimes every other year. There's always an audit of some sort going on in addition to the traditional financial audits, and there are things that regulators want to see and expect to see on which we are focused.

Going Public

It's important to recognize that a public company will have at least three committees: governance, compensation, and audit, all of which require appropriate expertise. For example, Audit requires a financial expert, so you want to make sure you have at least one financial expert. That's a defined term within the SEC, but it's basically someone who has been a financial executive, like a CFO, or has overseen financial executives like a CEO or someone who comes out of the financial industry, such as an auditor or someone with that type of background.

Separate Risk Committee

As we think about taking on more risk in particular at our bank, that usually is a full-board conversation, not just a committee conversation.

Risk is a very broad topic in every business and certainly in banks, and so we think about that in the context of where technology would then sit. There are a number of factors to consider in determining whether there should be a separate board risk committee.

For example, is technology a proactive thing or is it a risk thing, other than cybersecurity and privacy, etc.? We have established a separate a Technology Committee but have left non-technology risk within the domain of the Audit Committee

Perhaps as our bank and other institutions scale, then it could make sense at some point in time to break risk out. Right now, we've examined that, we've considered it, and we've concluded that risk sitting within audit works for us, and we feel like we're managing it effectively.

In this episode, Brad Feld, Mahendra Ramsinghani and Matt Blumberg talk about their new book, it is an incredibly inciteful and comprehensive look at Startups and all boards. An instruction manual for CEOs who are building and leading a board and a valuable reference for existing board members, aspiring board members and venture investors.

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Links

Startup Boards – Buy on Amazon

Quotes

Matt: It's never too early to build a board and, as a CEO, if you get good board dynamic, you have created a secret weapon for your business - a strategic sounding board that you couldn't go out and buy.

Brad ¨Jeff Lawson said: "I view the board as another team that I get, and why wouldn't I take advantage of being able to create a great team at that level that can help me grow and develop both the business and me as a CEO?" That summarized it as well as I've ever heard it said by an entrepreneurial CEO

The really interesting and important dynamic around board of directors are how they function as a team and how the individual participants engage with each other and how the CEO engages with the participant, and then how the management team fits into that, and that all of that is true if you're aspiring any of those things; board member, investor, entrepreneur, or experienced.

Mahendra: The board can make it a safe place for the CEO to feel comfortable, feel confident and engaged as a team of equals. It's important for the CEO to build their inner self-confidence so that they can sit in the same table, to be in the same room with people who are 5 years, 10 years ahead in the journey and hold their hand or say, "I need help. How would you do this?" At the same time, being honest, and what they did in that time may not always be relevant, so there's a fine line, but having the sense of confidence to surround yourself with giants is extremely important.

Matt: No Slides! When there are slides on the wall, two things happen. Whoever is presenting reads the slide out loud, which drives me crazy. It drives everybody crazy, because you should assume your board members can read. But the other thing that happens when you have a slide on the wall or a slide on the screen is that all eyes are on the slide. What you want to have in terms of a dynamic when you're trying to have a meaningful discussion among people on a team is you want eyes on each other, not eyes on the wall.

Brad: The best boards: you fight, you argue, you challenge each other, you disagree, but you're friends and you have respect for each other, and you carry each other with some amusement. Those are the best boards.

Big Ideas/Thoughts

New in the 2nd Edition of Book

• Matt added a lot of new content from a CEO's perspective

• We made a very significant shift and replaced a lot of sidebars and quotes with new content specifically from women and from people of color, to allow the book to be more representative of what a board should look like for a startup in 2022 in terms both gender and racial equity.

• We've written this book in such a way that it addresses the full spectrum from someone who is an aspiring entrepreneur, investor, board member, to someone who is a very experienced entrepreneur, investor, board member.

Lessons from the Boardroom

• If nobody does the work to develop the board as a team you have just a collection of people. I see that a lot among startup boards where the CEO does not put energy into building a highly functioning team or the CEO doesn't ask one of the board members to take a leadership role in helping her do that.

• There a benefit of having a lead director or a board chair who is not the CEO, because then that person can take the leadership when all of a sudden things are not being constructive and to try to shift the tone and the narrative and the discussion dynamic from one that's not constructive to one that is.

• In those situations, a strong, experienced, respected board member who might or might not be an investor can often play that role, and it's a very, very valuable position to have an outside director that's experienced, that's well respected who in those moments can step in and basically say some version of, "Hey guys and girls, cut the bullshit. Let's stop this. This is not being helpful. Let's step back. Let's calm down. Let's talk about what the issue is and try to solve the problem." It's important to have a lot of people that can play that role.

More Important Board Meeting Practices

• Prepare and circulate material in advance. Then assume the board members can read, so start the board meeting and run the board meeting as though everybody has already read the material.
• Have a clear objective of what is this meeting about.
• The best board meetings I'm in have a board package that goes out in advance that is separate from the board meeting presentation, and the board meeting presentation for each section has some version of a preamble, which is, "Here's what we're going to cover and here's what I want to accomplish as CEO.
• A lot of people think of their board or a way of thinking about the board is, " I've got to have some investors in my board, and so anybody else I add to my board, I want to get the best networking I can from them because I want introductions." That's really limited thinking. Especially if your business is young, you don't really know what direction it's going to go in, and so people that have very different frames of reference from you but experienced in things that are additive to what you're doing can add another layer of diversity to the board.
• There has to be a conscious effort to search for board members outside your zones of comfort. That is not easy. It takes time. There are no easy paths to build bridges into other domains, but that is a very essential function every entrepreneur should try and build upon.
• No Slides! When there are slides on the wall, two things happen. Whoever is presenting reads the slide out loud, which drives me crazy. It drives everybody crazy, because you should assume your board members can read. But the other thing that happens when you have a slide on the wall or a slide on the screen is that all eyes are on the slide. What you want to have in terms of a dynamic when you're trying to have a meaningful discussion among people on a team is you want eyes on each other, not eyes on the wall.

In this episode, Terry Johnson, an attorney who advises management and board members of both private and public companies, talks about what clients are facing regarding ESG risk identification and management, and how boards are responding to the growing push back against mandated board diversity and stakeholder capitalism.

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Bio

Terry is a corporate and securities partner at the law firm of Arnold & Porter. She acts as a trusted advisor to the C suite, boards of directors and board members. In her corporate governance work, she advises both public and private company boards and management on board diversity and stakeholder capitalism. Among other areas, her practice often involves counseling management and boards about ESG risk management, including disclosure and liability issues. She often speaks and writes about corporate governance and in particular, board diversity, including the California board diversity legislation and NASDAQ's listing rules, and she has authored articles in the Financial Times regarding the effectiveness of quotas in achieving board diversity and the treatment of climate change as a systematic risk to global finance. Terry's experience also includes representing wineries and winery owners, and family-owned companies in a variety of industries.

She has been recognized by the Daily Journal as one of the Top 100 Women Lawyers in California and has been included in Best Lawyers in America since 2014. In 2022 Terry was selected by the San Francisco Business Times as one of the 13 OUTstanding Voices paving the way for LGBTQ equality in the workplace in its annual Business of Pride awards. Terry is currently the Treasurer of the Bar Association of San Francisco, in line to assume the presidency in 2024.

Links

Caught in the Culture Wars Crossfire: Board Diversity Initiatives Under Attack

SEC Approves Nasdaq Diversity Proposal

Public shaming will not solve the lack of diversity on corporate boards

Treat Climate Change as a Systemic Risk to Global Finance

Quotes

Board Diversity

We are now starting to see a pushback on ESG generally and board diversity in particular as witnessed by the challenges to the California legislation regarding board diversity. Conservative groups are also bringing claims in the Fifth Circuit in Texas against NASDAQ's board diversity listing rule.

The NASDAQ rule is not mandatory, it's not a quota, it's a comply or disclose and explain why. Essentially, you're not required to put more diverse directors on the board, you just have to tell people why you haven't, but in today's world, knowing that there would be a strong disincentive to having to explain why you couldn't find a qualified woman for your board or you couldn't find a qualified member of an underrepresented group.

The investment community has been the loudest voice in support of board diversity, but we're certainly starting to hear other voices that are pushing back and saying, "No, we think you ought to be simply deciding board members based on the way we've always done it."

Diversity quotas are a "rough justice" approach in that it requires you to put different people on boards - but it does work.

The argument against mandated board diversity is that that instead of making a decision about a board member based on pure merit, it's made on another basis: "We don't want to be required to pick a director who happens to be a woman or director who happens to be part of a member of an underrepresented community, we want to pick the best director whoever that is."

Big Ideas/Thoughts

ESG risk management

The ESG realm is huge, I mean, just climate change alone under the E part of it, is an enormous topic in itself, and then S and G, the social and governance aspects of it are related, but completely separate sets of issues and concerns to think through.

Wildfires are a huge concern here in California, which is where I'm based, and a good example of ESG risk management. I'm talking to clients about in various respects about how to think about potential liability, how they could be affected by wildfires. If they are involved in a business that puts them at risk for liability related to wildfires, how to consider that - that's just one example of things that I'm starting to see come across my desk.

One of the things that is challenging to navigate the ESG waters, especially for public companies, is that you have to figure out how to say things because you want to let the market know about your commitment, but at the same time, not set yourself up for liability, and that's a huge challenge. For example, what it means is reading your ESG report side by side with the 10-Ks and 10-Qs and other periodic reports you've put out under your 34 Act reporting and making sure that at the bottom line, you don't have inconsistencies.

You have to be clear with the market and with all of your stakeholders, which would include not only your shareholders, but your employees and your suppliers and the communities in which you do business and so forth about exactly what you're going to do and to be careful about not making statements that could be called greenwashing, not overstating what you're going to do.

Stakeholder Capitalism

I think that the Business Roundtable's statement in August of 2019 really had an enormous impact on changing the conversation about stakeholder capitalism. It put that on the front page of every business newspaper, and it brought it to the forefront in a way that I don't know that any other kind of initiative could have done.

You have buy-in from companies that are the leading corporate lights, companies that are solidly in the mainstream, the biggest financial institutions, for example. I think that's really a good thing.

Q: When you advise your clients about stakeholder capitalism, what do you advise them to do in order to be able to manage this issue?

I draw their attention back to their fiduciary duties because the bottom line is, as a director, you have fiduciary duties, and that's what governs your job, that's your north star in fulfilling your duties as a member of the board…you have a fiduciary duty to your stockholders.

Regarding short-term and long-term goals and how you look at it in advising directors, I would say, "Well, your fiduciary duty is to your shareholders. You don't have a technical fiduciary duty to your stakeholders, but it's a question of looking at the long term and looking down the road.

Do you see that in order to operate your business in the longer term, you're going to need to start planning for the effects of climate change? You're going to need to start pivoting away from a particular business because it has such a high carbon impact, or maybe you want to invest in something that is a carbon capture technology?"

It all comes back to your shareholders - from a legal standpoint, that's still the guiding light.

Anthony Goodman is the leader of the North American Board Effectiveness Practice for Korn Ferry, and he understands the challenges boards face meeting the challenge of becoming a high performing board – and maintaining excellence. In this episode we discuss some of those challenges.

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Links

Anthony Bio

Analyzing emerging trends in board evaluation practices

How boards can adapt to support ESG efforts

The 'Climate Change' Director

Quotes

Who is responsible for ESG?

The idea that ESG is not going to impact the entire board and every committee is a mistake. If you think about ESG as it's supposed to be, it is about the company's strategy and its risk management. What you're really asking is, "what are the material risks and opportunities of ESG."

ESG Expertise

Question: With the increasing emphasis on ESG, does that mean board need a new set of skills and tools and, if so, what are some of the skills and tools they should be considering?

What boards need to do first is understand "what are the material risks and opportunities for our company, and when they have done that assessment, or management has done that assessment for them." Then the next question they need to ask is, "As we look at the issues for which we need to provide oversight, do we have the skills and experiences on the board to do that?

If there's something glaringly missing, how do we get that skill into the board? But maybe it's about the whole board upskilling. Maybe it's about the fact that everyone on the board actually needs to understand what the material risks to the business are.

Michelle Edkins, who runs the stewardship team globally at BlackRock, has this wonderful saying: "A board made up of one trick ponies is a circus."

Board Effectiveness

How involved is the board in the strategy how involved has the board been in helping to develop the strategy and overseeing the strategy? How involved are they in risk management and identifying and making sure that risks are being dealt with? How effective have they been in hiring and firing CEOs

The question is who can the board get feedback from? It's often just within the board itself, but you could, for instance, ask senior managers whether the board is actually adding any value to them. Is it providing guidance? Is it providing challenge? Do they feel stretched by this board or not?

You could ask your investors. You could ask your audit firm. You could ask your law firm. There are a number of stakeholders that are in and around the boardroom that observe how the board is doing.

Board meeting agenda

It takes a certain amount of courage to ask for an outside-in view of the board. It's much easier to do than an inside-out view and just ask the other directors how you're doing.

People have got a lot of choices these days. The idea that boards are the buyer, actually no, boards now have to sell themselves to candidates, particularly good candidates who are women - who are people of color, who are digital natives - because those are the people everyone want on their board, and the real question is, why should they want to come on your board?

I think we've all got to be grownups about this, that sometimes it's just our time and we have to be willing to let go, but I think a lot of people's personal identity is tied up with being a board director, and if this is your last public company board, you're going to try and hang on to it as long as you can. Otherwise, what are you going to tell people down at the golf club that you do? You're a board director.

I sometimes say collegiality is a mask that covers up a lot of problems underlying in the board, and one of them is the inability to let go and allow people to make a dignified exit from the board.

Big Ideas/Thoughts

Board Culture

Culture problems cause issues for lots of companies, and it isn't just when there's a merger. It can be where you've got groups of employees that are fundamentally different from each other. How do you treat those employees?

The question that comes to my mind here is accountability: how does a board hold management accountable for building the culture.

I think it's very hard to draw a straight line between an effective board and an effective company, but I think when the board is ineffective, it starts to erode what the company can do, what kind of strategic opportunities it has, the quality of the people it can recruit into senior management. A bad board, I think, can create a lot of havoc inside a company, but a good board doesn't necessarily make for a good company.

Boards are often lagging indicators around strategic change. They're not always leading indicators and we often see companies where the board is quite a way adrift of where the company has evolved to.

I want to give you another C-word that boards should be thinking about and that's courage. If we had courageous conversations between board chairs and board directors, between non-gov chairs and board directors, this [off-boarding] would be so much easier. But collegiality often trumps courage, and I think that's a big problem for boards.

Diversity

Just to go back a little bit, so why is there this focus on diversity? A lot of it actually came via the investors, the investor community. Why did they want boards to become more diverse? What they're really trying to do, I think, is to make sure that boards are cognitively diverse, but that is something that is really hard to do from outside.

You can't assess whether a board is cognitively diverse from the outside, and by the way, there's nobody trying to assess whether they're cognitively diverse on the inside either. What do investors say? They've said, "Okay, if we knew that the people on the board who definitely come from different backgrounds and different approaches to life, then we could imagine there might also be cognitive diversity."

Our own practice, our board practice over the last couple of years, has been running at about 55% of all the people we put on boards in the US are women or people of color, I think that's pretty consistent across all the search firms.

A lot of first-time directors, women and people of color, are not perhaps being heard as much in the boardroom as they would have liked. I think a lot of board chairs probably think they're doing a good job trying to get everybody's voices to be heard, but I think that boards have to work quite hard to be inclusive and to make sure everyone feels comfortable in the boardroom.

Board Succession Planning

They ought to be looking at the strategy of the company, thinking about where it's heading over the next three to five years, and then looking at the skills and experiences that they have today and understanding the gaps. Let's say 10 years ago, the company might've been a purely domestic company. Now it's made a number of acquisitions globally, and there's nobody on the board with international experience.

Think about what next three, four, five directors are going to look like, and wouldn't it be great if out of those five, at least two, maybe three were going to be women that a certain number would be people of color, a certain number of them would be under the age of 56. In that way, if we land on some fantastic former CEO today, happens to be a white male and doesn't check any of those other boxes, we can still have that person on our board because we know we've got four more slots to fill, and we're going to make sure that in that batch of five people that we've got all the skills, experiences, and backgrounds that we want as opposed to trying to load them all on one person.

In a very short time - six, seven years - we've gone from impact investing being referred to as "invest for less" to "companies responsibly harnessing technology to solve big problems will outperform." In this episode we discuss how ESG has helped to drive that shift and the impact it is having on investing and board governance.

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We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here.

Links

Board education & certification: https://www.pfisterstrategy.com/exceptionalboarddirector

Book on Board Architecture: https://www.pfisterstrategy.com/books

Gabe Bio: https://obvious.com/team/gabe-kleinman

Quotes

Ev Williams on why he founded Obvious Ventures: "I want to fund the companies that I wish existed in the world."

Obvious exists to back purpose-driven founders reimagining trillion dollar sectors. We are a multi-specialty firm investing in the fundamental building blocks of life and society: food, transportation, housing, healthcare, and more, investing in companies that are completely reimagining each of those sectors for the better.

For the first number of years at Obvious Ventures, we did not talk about impact. We actually banned the "I" word because the industry of "impact investing," as it was originally constructed, was not a returns-focused industry. It was an industry wishing to realize some returns alongside some sort of social or environmental impact. There was a general belief that one would have to sacrifice profits in order to get that impact return, so to speak.

We founded Obvious Ventures on the simple belief that the most valuable companies of our time will be the ones solving humanity's biggest problems."

For earlier-stage venture, board observers are common, and I think that's due to the nature of the stage of the company and what they need to do in order to survive, because for early-stage venture-backed companies the fatality rate is high – they want as much good advice and help as they can get.

A colleague of mine has a saying, "Startups don't die of starvation. They die of indigestion." And so helping them figure out what to focus on and how to get there really helps, and from a CEO standpoint, the board is an extension of your team.

Board meeting agenda

So many boards get bogged down in the actual board room with these graphs and data and charts and everyone's squinting and it's like going through a boring presentation for 80% of the meeting. We recommend that CEOs really anchor their meetings in OKRs, (known as Objectives and Key Results), walking through a literal scorecard of how we are doing. Red, not going so well, yellow, we're doing okay, and green, things are going really well.

If you're spending 80% of your board meeting with presentations, you're wasting your time. The board meeting is not the time to educate the board. That is the board's homework. They should come to the meeting, having done their homework and be prepared to do exactly what you just said, address the issues that the CEO and/or whatever, the management team is really grappling with to get the most value out of the people that are in the room.

Boring presentations at a meeting can be a telltale sign. Most early-stage startup and venture-backed boards are hands-on problem-solving boards. The nature of the meeting tells you a lot of what's going on with early-stage boards.

Objectives and Key Results, and it's a framework popularized by John Doerr, and before him, Andy Grove at Intel, can be an effective way of running organizations from small to large, and especially an effective dashboarding mechanism for board meetings.

Big Ideas/Thoughts

What is a B Corp

What it means to become a certified B Corp is you have to score above a certain threshold on an assessment that an organization called B Lab has created which assesses what are functionally environmental, social, and governance practices of the company. I think it's a great tool for any company of any size to take just as a reflective tool to understand your operation and how you're doing.

Refreshing your board

A company is a different company at a Series B stage or series C stage with $50 million in annualized revenue, then when it had a $100,000 ARR and it was just getting started with three board members. So often it makes sense that a CEO may need a different set of directors with a different kind of experience at a different stage, while still maintaining some continuity and understanding of the roots and the original purpose of the organization.

Impact Investing vs Investing in purpose-driven companies

We believe that the biggest challenges that our world is facing, oftentimes highlighted by activists and social entrepreneurs were, in fact, big market opportunities and that companies solving those problems would realize the greatest returns

If you look at both consumer sentiment as well as companies that are trying to attract the best employees, the best employees want to work at companies that are having some sort of an impact, and the easiest way for us to measure that impact is through revenue generated and services rendered. It's that simple.

For example, if you look at Proterra, every time they sell an electric bus, they're taking a diesel bus off the road. Every time Diamond Foundry sells an engagement ring or creates a semiconductor wafer chip that is lab grown, it's hopefully taking a diamond mine, which is carbon-intensive with horrible labor practices, out of business.

It's everywhere now, and everybody is waking up to the reality of these problems that we have to solve. It's important to note that we need the public sector. There's no question about that. Without a healthy public sector, none of these can be solved, and same with social activists who often highlight these areas for us, but we need the private sector to be a driver of innovation and delivering those solutions through the market. We are believers in capitalism. We think we need to change the definition and the practices of capitalism, but that's kind of happening on its own. Everyone is waking up to these new realities and the role of the private sector in helping solve them.

Beyond Meat as a great example of the shift. There were plenty of plant-based options before Beyond Meat, Morningstar Burgers and Quorn, and they were all in the novelty food section of the supermarket. The epic shift that Beyond Meat pioneered was you don't have to be a vegetarian to love a plant-based product. We are not creating something that is for vegetarians only …we are competing with Angus, and we are going to take them on. One of the big defining moves that Ethan Brown pioneered at Beyond Meat was getting Beyond Meat placed in the meat case alongside Angus options so that everyday people could choose these things. What it really boiled down to was creating a super product that competed with the "original," and you see this playing out across a host of industries, not just in plant-based protein. Tesla makes the safest, fastest car – which also happens to be the best for the reducing carbon. Nest makes the most beautiful, money-saving thermostat ­– which also happens to be best for efficient energy use. And so on.

In this episode, Mark A. Pfister, the "Board Architect," talks about how to build a board, what that means and the powerful impact it has on any company or organization.

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We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here.

Links

Board education & certification: https://www.pfisterstrategy.com/exceptionalboarddirector

Book on Board Architecture: https://www.pfisterstrategy.com/books

Quotes

The architecture component of a board forces the thought process that you are looking and planning earlier. Whether you're creating a new board, or you're looking to rebuild an existing board, put some discipline behind this, look at the design aspects of it, understand there is a successful formula and model for boards that work efficiently and effectively; hence, the terminology of "board architecture" over "board structure."

Three areas of focus in board architecture

1. Sphere of influence.

This relates to the vertical components of a properly built board. Core leadership competency, operations experience, and skillset competencies.

1. Planes of Congruence.

This looks at the character of the Board, essentially the horizontal components. These can include balance of personality types, mix of industry backgrounds, diversity, age ranges, and many other components.

1. Coverage and Balance.

This has to do with creating a depth of knowledge and somewhat of an overlap of knowledge on the board. It allows for at least one other person, if not more, to have that ability to question whether it's at a governance level, whether it's at a technical level, just to understand and bring that conversation to additional questions and elevate the outcome, which is what that board is there to do .

"There's this interesting trend where placement and search organizations are being engaged to a certain degree, but the nominating committee has really taken an end-to-end process back into their purview and they're managing that process from end to end."

Testing of board members

I use two tests, one is called the GPPI or Gordon Personal Profile Inventory, and that particular test allows me to assess what I correlate to the emotional intelligence and the mindfulness intelligence. It's not just about IQ anymore.

Another one that I use is a Watson-Glaser test that allows as a comparison back to if someone's claiming to be an expert or a certain level of leadership, you can compare that back, and all of these tests are comparing back against big data so it's not that it's right or wrong answers. It's about are other people at that level successful and how is this person comparing with that?

"I believe that 90-plus percent of most issues within any board of directors of any entity type relates back to its lack of architecture in the way the board is built, so that makes it even more important for an aspiring director to understand how they avoid engagements or even appointments where they're just simply not going to be happy, or their risk goes up."

"I am of the mindset that we are not just representing shareholders anymore that are only focused on the financial outcome of the organization. To me, and this is another observable, a board that is focused not just on the shareholder aspect, but also on the stakeholders, which are many - that's employees, that's vendors, that's consumers of the product and services - that viewpoint has to be an equal weighted consideration in the boardroom."

"Whatever failures happen in an organization. I don't look at the CEO. I look at the board first and foremost." The CEO is a direct representative at the operational level of the organization representing the board, period.

"Every director should keep in the back of their mind 'values equal culture equals organizational risk level' - all of it can be related back to that."

Big Ideas/Thoughts

Question: What is the interrelationship between strategy and governance?

Board directors cannot properly govern without a deep understanding of not just a theory of strategy, but what the strategy is of the organization.

The diagram that I recommend, and I use in our board training is very simple. On one side sits the word goals, on the other side sits the word tasks, and in between that is a double-edged arrow or double-pointing arrow, that's strategy.

Strategy is connecting the goals to the tasks of the organization - - it's the how. When you hear "strategy" you should think "how?."

We should be saying to ourselves as a director, "We need to fully understand the goals of this organization, and once they're set for a certain time period (the what and the why), the rest of our existence in the boardroom as it relates to governance is truly overseeing the strategy. It's the governance of the strategy, which is the how.

You cannot govern something if you don't understand the strategy, they are inextricably linked and they're absolutely related, and this is a big miss for many senior level leaders today is that they don't understand where governance sits as it relates to strategy.

Strategy today is an integrated pattern of decision-making, which in a leadership mindset, if you think about an integrated pattern of decision-making, it forces you to ask questions.

Question: In a situation where the CEO and their senior team are responsible for developing the strategy, what is, in your view, the best way for the board to be involved to a point where they're not doing the job of the senior management, but are fully involved in understanding the strategy and are able to ask the questions they need to ask of the management?

I am actually probably a little more hands-on in my belief of the board's involvement with the strategy, and I would even say with the goals of the organization, I view those two areas as a very close working relationship between the CEO and the board.

I'm not saying that the CEO should not step away and work with their team on coming up with possibly a proposed strategy, but I am also a fan before the CEO does that, that the board has some sort of very high strategic planning session and goal-setting session with the CEO.

I am an absolute fan of every single board having a strategic planning committee, and I would even like to see the naming of that change so it's not misconstrued and call it more so a strategy committee, because strategic planning is assuming that the board is doing the planning, so I think that should change.

Risk Committee. Any clients that I work with in the board architecture realm, I'm laser focused on not just the strategic committee, but also the risk committee, and I think there's this misunderstanding or misnomer out there that, "Well, that's the responsibility of the audit committee." My comment typically on that is that I'm not disputing by any means risk as it relates to finance, but the number of risks that are being dealt with in every organization today that require a home, especially at the board level, I don't think any company can get away with that right now…..you have to separate out not just financial risks, but overall company and organization risks.

Raza: I think as we've talked with our guests, including David Koenig, the audit committee is kind of focusing on what has happened, at the least it needs a separate time, separate mindset, a separate hat on to say, what is the future possibilities of risks, both positive and negative, in the sense that, are we taking enough risks, and hence, having a separate risk committee is likely the best way to drive that.

Mark: Well, I would love to see more of a formal approach as it relates to education and certification or risk areas for a board. David Koenig has done that with the DCRO.

Todd Sears is the founder and CEO of Out Leadership, the first company in history whose sole product is LGBTQ+ equality. Todd has spent over 20 years working at the intersection of finance and equality. He began his career as an investment banker before joining Merrill Lynch as a financial advisor. There, he brought almost $2 billion of new assets to the firm from LGBTQ+ couples and nonprofit organizations. In this episode we talk about Out Leadership, its role as a B Corp, merging business opportunity with diversity and the impact of Out Leadership on LGBTQ+ Equality. Thanks for listening! We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here.

Links

Todd Sears Bio

Out Leadership Website

Visibility Counts – Corporate Guidelines for LGBT + Self-ID

Visibility Counts – The LGBTQ+ Board Leadership Opportunity

OutQOURUM 2022

Quotes

Founding of Out Leadership

"I ultimately ran diversity strategy for Merrill Lynch and then I was head of diversity of Credit Suisse, and then in 2010 I actually was laid off and was sitting on my sofa with the severance check and multiple martinis.

As I found out, all good ideas come from a martini or two. I thought back to the opportunity that I had at Merrill Lynch to, by virtue of creating a business initiative in a very old-school command and control Irish Catholic investment bank like Merrill to support LGBTQ+ equality from a business perspective, and I thought, "Well, could I do the same thing, but with more companies, not just one?"

So, I looked at Davos World Economic Forum and I thought, "If I could I create that conversation in the LGBTQ+ community?" Because 12 years ago, you did not see businesses speaking up on equality. CEOs were not using their platform and their voice and I wanted to create that, so I used my severance check, started our first summit in March 2011 hosted by the CEO of Deutsche Bank and we had bank of America, Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and then grew from there."

Work with Equilar with OutQOURUM

"A key piece of the conversation is having the opportunity for LGBTQ leaders to self-identify, and Out Leadership almost five years ago wrote the first research on self-ID globally in partnership with Ropes & Gray. We found that companies asked their LGBTQ employees to self-identify in 38 countries globally, but at the same point at the board level, it is still completely absent.

David has used that data, the research, and actually the policies that we've written to try to identify more LGBTQ board members in the Equilar database, so that we can start to expand that pool of diversity."

LGBTQ and the definition of Diversity

"I'm interested right now in particular, AB 979, the California law requiring board diversity. We were a part of, from the drafting perspective, believe it or not, when it was first introduced, the definition of diversity did not include Asian or LGBTQ, and so Ascent Pinnacle and Out Leadership and Quorum worked to have both of those diverse categories added.

But interestingly now, AB 979 is under attack. The State of California is being sued and our leadership is one of the expert witnesses that is testifying to try to protect a law increasing diversity, which is just baffling to me. Every piece of research shown that that shows LGBT and broader diversity bring innovation, de-risk all of the reasons you want diversity on the board, so to be anti-business and sue against the law that seeks to create that, just blows my mind."

"The United States Congress had three different bills focused on diversity in 2021. Not one of them, when it was introduced into the committee, included LGBTQ and we had to advocate and we were able to get LGBTQ added to all three of them, including a board diversity one and ultimately I testified to Maxine Waters' House Financial Services Committee in November about all of these exclusions and why it matters for LGBTQ people to be included at all these levels of diversity."

On B Corp and Out Leadership

"Why that matters in my opinion is if I was going to sit with CEOs, and we've worked with over 800 now over the last 12 years, if I was going to sit with a CEO and say that LGBT equality is a business issue, I need to be a business too. It's very different to have the nonprofit warm fuzzies, as we said earlier, conversation. If I'm a business, I pay taxes just like they do. I have to grow just like they do. We reinvest our profits. That's, to me, an important story."

"the most important piece of the B Corp rating is what are you actually doing, and that's something I think it's really important and I think it's why so many more companies are looking at the B Corp status. There are a number of companies that are looking to convert to B Corp not just the Ben & Jerry's and Patagonia are B Corp, but there are significant numbers of corporations that are considering it now."

Out Leadership, Tools and Research

"One of the tools that Out Leadership built almost six years ago was our corporate guidelines for board diversity, and we include in the back of that, an actual matrix that is inclusive of all the elements of diversity that we recommend, both acquired and inherent diversity, skills, background, national origin, all of the pieces, and I encourage private companies to think about that and to use that as they're thinking about diversification of their boards."

"Our Quorum initiative last year launched our first ever Quorum Summit. Out Leadership has summits annually in New York, London, Hong Kong Paris and Sydney, but with our talent issues, we built a summit as well and last year's summit, we launched the first ever LGBTQ board research called Visibility Counts. This year on March 22nd, we'll be launching the second annual Visibility Counts piece of research.

There are a couple of key pieces that the most important last year and I think this year is that we did map last year of the Fortune 500 on their board diversity policies. That was the first time that it had ever been done in history, by the way, and not just LGBTQ, we mapped across race, gender, ethnicity, orientation, veteran status, disability status, et cetera.

This year's report, we are mapping the Fortune 1000 and the entire NASDAQ so all 5,300 listed companies on the NASDAQ. Now, I will point out that the NASDAQ doesn't even have that data themselves. We went to them first and asked if they had it and they don't. We did it for them and the Fortune 1000 as well.

I can give you a quick little preview. Only about 2.4% of NASDAQ companies include LGBTQ and the definition of diversity and only about 15% even include gender, so they've got an awful lot of work to do, which I think is why Dina wanted to make this an effort and they've put it over time. It's not just a point in time. They have, I think, a four-year lead in, but they've got a long way to go, which I think is going to be surprising when we release the full report."

David Chun is the founder and CEO of Equilar, one of the most trusted names in the corporate governance community. He has been recognized as one of the most 100 influential players in corporate governance by the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD). In this episode we discuss how the

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Links

Equilar website: https://www.equilar.com/

Equilar Diversity Network: https://www.equilar.com/diversity

As Corporate Boards Pursue Diversity, Director Training Programs Spring Up:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-corporate-boards-pursue-diversity-director-training-programs-spring-up-11640946604

Quotes

Founding of Equilar

worked in investment banking for DLJ (Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette), and that was really the transformative experience for me to really learn about data, what's out there. I spent a lot of time going through SEC filings and recognized that, "Hey, there's an opportunity to potentially build the business around this data.

In '97, my wife and I moved out to California to help open up the DLJ Menlo Park office right in the heart of Silicon Valley, and when you're out here, especially in the late nineties, everybody wanted to start a company and so I said, "Hey, it's not going to get any easier for me. Let's go ahead and let's give it a shot."

It looks a lot easier from the outside, but kind of once you get in you'll realize, "Wow, it is hard." That's the reason 90-plus percent of businesses never make it beyond a couple of years.

I just happened to be at the right place at the right time with the executive compensation data that is essentially the foundation of our business.

Raza

David, Joe and I have often talked on this podcast that the old excuse of "we can't find enough qualified" candidates is no longer really available, and I think what you're doing is the last mile step in bringing that to fruition!

David

It's big data opportunity where there are, like I said, 1.2 million candidates. Having a lot of data is not the answer. The key is getting to the right data as quickly as possible, and so literally when somebody says, "I can't find candidates," I say, "Hey, do you have 10 seconds?"

You can get binders of information about women, but if you're not able to figure it out how you may be potentially connected to that individual, those binders and those lists are not that valuable because what people are looking for is not only to show me candidates, but is there some level of connectivity to them?

Rate of increase in women directors of public companies

The rate of change is pretty much at parity now, so its one-to-one so as new board seats are being refilled, roughly a 50/50 balance, and we should reach parity by around 2030.

Big Ideas/Thoughts

We mine the compensation that's disclosed in annual proxy filings. We also have our proprietary survey where we collect data compensation, that data that companies provide as part of a broader survey, and we've got close to a thousand companies that use our data for various benchmarking purposes.

You'll see us often cited in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC and others, where they're looking for pay statistics

We have over just across 1.2 million profiles in our dataset of anyone who's been an executive or board member of a public company, private company non-profits and others, and so we are excited about how that's become, also a way to better serve our clients. As we all know work diversity is a very hot topic right now on the agenda of every board, public, private, nonprofit, and others.

Within our BoardEdge product, we built up the Equilar Diversity Network where we partnered with over 50 different organizations to help match the demand and the supply for diverse talent,

We also allow people to claim their profiles, so people have gone in, they've enriched and particularly added important metrics like their ethnicity or their sexual orientation and disability, veteran status, because what we want in a company, we want to make it much easier for our corporate clients and search firms and others who use our database to find these candidates.

Partnership with NASDAQ

That's when we found out that this was happening, and what we feel really great about is that since NASDAQ was using our products and they had this big vision of what the big broader ESG vision and my guess, and I don't know this for sure, but behind the scenes over at NASDAQ, when they were putting this together saying, "Hey, if we're going to go out this and ask NASDAQ-listed companies to set a new standard, how do we help them?" And I think that's honestly maybe where Joan said, "Hey, we've been using Equilar. It's a great database. Let's work out some type of partnership with them."

So, yeah, we're honored to be part of that, to be working with them with all of their listed companies, and NASDAQ being technology is very focused on ESG. It blends in well with both what we're doing. They're able to offer to their companies, "Here's a resource. If you don't have the requisite diversity or you want more diversity, here's a place you can go to get it."

We talked about earlier was one of the things that really strikes me is that one of the great strengths is that you can enhance the database of virtually any other company, so they don't see you as a competitor to them. executive search, private equity well, of course they have their own database any relationship-based business where relationships play a critical part of one's offering.

we have our network center, and so that's where our clients are maintaining their pipeline of candidates. So ,every quarter, when a nom/gov committee meets, they can export that and they can be assured that everything has been updated

Without question, the tragic events that have happened, let me show you the dates. It was summer 2020 with George Floyd and the whole Black Lives Matter movement, and that was a wake-up call for corporate America and just recognizing, "Hey, have we done enough? What are the things that we could do differently?" the rate of change has probably doubled so that's a pretty substantial increase over a year.

A lot of boards really took that to heart and there's been a big push to bring. African-American and Black individuals into the boardroom, so that's tremendous progress there. I also would add to that, about four or five years ago, we launched the gender diversity index, and so we're looking at the rate of women on boards. When we looked at this, when we first calculated, I think it was like fall of '16, beginning of '17, I don't know if I'm getting the dates right, roughly 25% of the Russell 3000, so over 750 companies did not have any women on their board

Wow.

And it wasn't that long ago.

They shared it with me, I said, "This can't be right. We can't publish this. I've got to see the data," and so they shared the file with me, and I started going through them. I didn't go through all 750, but I went through about 20 to 30 of them, and I'm like, "Oh, my God, this is right. This is really the state of play.

this stunning statistic that over a million men joined the labor force last month that are taking a job or looking for one compared to only 39,000 women. What explains it then? How does that fit into the diversity push in general?

Yeah. To be able to fill those board seats, you're going to need to have a pipeline of women executives that are going to be quote unquote "board ready." And if you're not having as many women coming back into the workforce, that pipeline is just going to get thinner and thinner.

Roberta has been a CEO, a founder-entrepreneur, and a corporate executive as well as a highly experienced board member who has served in executive and board leadership positions on a variety of private, public and non-profit boards. In this episode, we talk about the vital importance of board governance – and how valuable it can be to any company or organization.

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Roberta Sydney LinkedIn

National Association of Corporate Directors

Private Directors Association

American College of Corporate Directors

Women Corporate Directors

Extraordinary Women on Boards

Quotes

Most important issues facing boards today

The first and second issue facing boards today revolves around human capital. I would say top of mind is still employees and employee safety. Who are we hiring? How are we making sure that they can get their work done productively, safely? How do we onboard new people in this remote environment? How do we develop people? That's number one, and I would say is number two is employee retention.

Then third is around culture and strategy because, culture will eat strategy for breakfast. And so, boards need to ask--how do you create, enhance, grow the culture that you want and how can you be sure that that is the lived culture when people aren't together as much as they used to be.

Big Ideas/Thoughts

The pandemic has exposed many warts on strategy. What kind of preparedness did we have in place to handle a crisis? Was there sufficient succession planning? Where have we created risk by not acting?

The pandemic to a great extent has also exposed the warts on the governance practices of many private company boards. For example, boards have needed to ask--who do we have on our board now that can help guide us in ways that are going to make a difference? The first step is often updating or developing a skills matrix, to evaluate board composition annually and answer the question--what skills do we need on our Board for the next three to five years?

Good governance is good governance and there are best practices even though they still must be tailored to company stage, company size, and industry complexity. If you lack basic governance structures and procedures, it's very difficult to be effective.

On the boards on which I am privileged to serve, we develop what we call a decision matrix. It's helps define the "swim lanes." What are the decisions management makes? What are the decision that need to come to the board? What are the decisions that owners should make? Getting clear on these swim lane issues has been very, very helpful in setting the ground rules for how we can all engage together and move this business from where it is today to something even better

Board education is particularly important. There's no substitute for directors, especially those that might be less familiar with board practice, to learn and be open to learning about what a good board agenda or a what a good committee agenda looks like. What kind of risk management should the board be doing? What would be an enterprise risk framework look like for a business like ours?

Almost anything becomes possible if you open your mind to say: "we're going to make better decisions and get better results because of the governance that we're putting in place here."

Stakeholder Capitalism

The mission of the organization matters now more than ever. Employees want to do something that matters, and they want to be somewhere where they're solving problems or delivering a service that that is helping meaningfully. Every company today is trying to figure out a way to make sure that it has a mission that resonates with both its employee base and its customer base.

Long-term financial viability relates to ESG - environmental, social, and governance - and big institutional investors are giving that message to the companies in which they might invest – that message is an important catalyst in driving this agenda forward.

When consumers boycott Uber because of business practices or when consumers say I don't want to own the stock of Exxon - these are signals, strong, strong signals that companies need to heed and re-engineer how they're conducting business.

Alexander Lowry is a professor at Gordon College in Wenham Massachusetts where he is the Executive Director of the Master's in Financial Analysis program and the creator, voice and driving force behind "Boardroom Bound" - a weekly podcast about boards of directors, how to become a board member, how to excel at the job and the important impact that boards have on business and our society.

Thanks for listening!

We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here.

Links

Alexander Lowry Bio

Gordon College Masters of Science in Financial Analysis

Recommended Books

Authored by Boardroom Bound Guests

Governance in the Digital Age/Dottie Schillinger

Dare to Serve/ Cheryl Batchelder

Be Board Ready and Behind Boardroom Doors/ Betsy Atkins

Boards That Lead/ Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem

Authored by On Boards Guests

Family Business Handbook - How to Build and Sustain a Successful Enduring Enterprise/Rob Lachenauer and Josh Baron

The Board Members Guide to Risk/David Koenig

High Performance Boards/Didier Cossin

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business/Matt Blumberg

Our Common Ground: Insights From Four Years of Listening to American Voters/Diane Hessan

Quotes

Boards are one of the most important things in the business world and people weren't talking about - that's what led me to start Boardroom Bound.

If someone says, "Help me get a board seat," that's like saying, "Help me get a job." I don't know what to do with that. What industry you want to work in? What size of company? Is it compensated, non-compensated, public versus private? There are all these sorts of things you have to help me figure out to know what you should do, and it only then that I can even begin to start giving you guidance. It's as if I went to you guys and said, "Guys, help me get a job," you'd say, "What does it mean?"

Even after you have given some thought to getting a board seat, I would test you a little bit. All right, so tell me what's most important. Is it the compensation?" And some people would say, yes. I appreciate their honesty, but that's not a good driver for it. "But okay, if it is the compensation, what do you think you're going to make in what are you trying to do?" "Well, I want to be on the board of JP Morgan and make $250,000 a year." I'm like, "Hmm. What kind of size company did you work in?"

"I worked at a bunch of startups." "Well, that's probably not realistic. Let's take what you came up with and let's talk about reality. You're probably not going to be on a board with a company cap size bigger than where you've worked before.

If, for example, you have only worked in private companies, then you should focus on that. There are lots of different opportunities there. I would take exactly what you said, Joe, let's dive into it a little bit more, make sure we're all coming from the same page, and then you can come up with a game plan to do it.

Once you've got that, okay, networking is going to be a big part of it. For some people that's a dirty word. It doesn't need to be a dirty word. How big is your network today? Do you know people who are on boards? Do you know people that service boards like accountants and consultants and lawyers that can be helpful for you? And then how much time will you spend every week? Are you going to spend an hour a day? Are you going to spend an hour a week? Now, a lot of that's going to predict how long it's going to take for you and how successful you will ultimately be.

Big Ideas/Thoughts

Being a Board Member is a job

Joe Some people don't understand that a board seat is a job. Some people think it's kind of a nice thing to do when you retire or in your "spare time" but in fact, it's a job and you need to take it as seriously as you would any other job.

Accepting a board seat

I think most first-time board members will usually jump at the chance to be on any board, and that is not a great idea. Someone has worked really hard to land a paid board seat. That was their dream, that was their goal, and they made it happen. You're super excited, this is amazing, right? Well, it doesn't mean you should take it. Think about this as like you're applying for a job. Just because you get a job offer doesn't mean it's going to be a fit. Is this a place where you're setting yourself up for success? Can you do this? Do you want to do this? Boards are very different from each other.

Some boards rubber stamp what the CEO comes up with. Is that the kind of board you want to be on? If so, great. Know that other boards are very collaborative, very open, very discussion oriented, very much about coming up with a strategy that helps the organization. Is that the type of board you're going to fit in with? Is that the kind of the space you want to be in?

Due Diligence before accepting a board seat

An example of doing due diligence: A guest was offered her first board seat, and she had worked really hard to get it. She was excited about it, it was a public company, it checked all the boxes, but she didn't feel comfortable. She went through the interview process but had that little person on her shoulder telling me "there's a danger here, Will Robinson" - think about this."

Here's what happened: She offered: "Let me sign some NDA so I can sit in one meeting. I won't vote. I'm just sitting in the back. I want to observe. I need to observe." And they thought she was the right person, so they agreed to this. I don't know why. She actually saw a fistfight break out during the meeting. She's like, "I knew this was not the place for me."

That's an extreme version of due diligence. The point is you want to be on the right board for you because you will do well. And if you do well, that will lead to other boards because the people you're sitting and working with will inevitably also be connected to other boards and they'll know, "Oh my gosh, Johnny over here was phenomenal. I should think of another opportunity." But if you stink it up in the boardroom, you're not going to get another one.

Bo proactive about onboarding

Alexander

Isn't it terribly ironic that companies spend all of this time and energy and money trying to bring someone on, but don't didn't treat a bioard members the way they treat any normal employee who they hire.

Joe

Yes, ironic that people, boards, organizations spend so much time recruiting and then they drop the ball with onboarding and fail to get full value out of this person.

Alexander

If you think about this whole onboarding process, show up at your desk, all the stuff is laying there and you come to a certain training and meet all the people. Often, in the boardroom, it's, "Well, you know what you're doing. We'll just throw you in, come to the next meeting and you'll be great." That's not setting anybody up for success.

If your company is not taking it upon themselves to do a proper onboarding process, make sure that you are doing it to set yourself up for success.