Coco Brown created The Athena Alliance when she found herself in Silicon Valley “a lone woman among a sea of men.” Here she talks about board recruitment, refreshment, tenure, and how an “only” on a board can make their voice heard and add value.

What does it mean to be a good employer and corporate citizen today? JUST Capital CEO Martin Whittaker talks about changing roles in 2020, the challenges of ESG reporting, and what boards should think about leading up to the US presidential election.

By 2020, many in the governance world expected corporate boards to be at least 30% women. Yet halfway through September, we’re still at 22%, and women of color only constitute 4% to 6% of membership on Fortune 500 boards.

In this episode, podcast co-host Meghan Day discusses the situation with Phyllis Campbell. In addition to holding an executive leadership position with JPMorgan Chase & Co. in the Pacific Northwest, she brings a governance perspective from the boards of two leading consumer companies in sectors that are undergoing great challenges: Alaska Air Group and Nordstrom.

An advocate for diversity in executive leadership, she has also served on the Diversity Advisory Board (DAB) of Toyota, on the nonprofit boards of PATH and the US-Japan Council, and on the global advisory board of Women Corporate Directors (WCD) and the NACD Governance National Advisory Council.

What does a high-performing board look like in 2020, already a year like no other? To gain some insights, podcast co-host Meghan Day talks to a particularly busy director: Anna Catalano.

Not only does Catalano serve on the boards of Willis Towers Watson, Kraton Corporation, HollyFrontier Corporation, Frontdoor, Inc., and Appvion, she is a certified Board Leadership Fellow of the National Association of Corporate Directors as well as president of its Texas/Tri-Cities Chapter and board member for the Alzheimer’s Association and the Houston Grand Opera.

In this episode, she shares her reflections from these varied experiences on how today’s boards can stay ahead of crisis and change.

“We may vote against the election of directors where we have concerns that a company might not be dealing with E&S factors appropriately.”

This new addition to BlackRock’s corporate governance and proxy voting guidelines shifts ESG from “an afterthought to a strategic imperative” for boards, says Helle Bank Jorgensen, a globally recognized sustainability, climate change, and ESG expert.

To help board members keep pace, Jorgensen founded Competent Boards to give current and future directors an online platform to learn from global experts and each other. The end goal is for board members to “get the tools to get the insight to get the foresight they need to make better decisions and make their companies more resilient.”