Building Better Boards

Building Better Boards PDF

Author: David A. Nadler

Publisher: Wiley + ORM

Published: 2011-01-07

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 1118046978

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Praise for Building Better Boards "Building Better Boards bridges the gap between talk and action. A must-read for board members, CEOs, governance experts - really for anyone who cares about the future of the corporation." Anne M. Mulcahy, chairman and CEO, Xerox Corporation "Building Better Boards covers all the key issues facing boards in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley era. It provides practical advice based on the authors' wide-ranging experience with major companies that have built successful boards." Marty Lipton, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen Roger W. Raber, president and CEO, National Association of Corporate Directors "This book provides a comprehensive review and effective guide to making any board an effective team, and thus an asset, for their company." Richard H. Koppes of Counsel, Jones Day, and former general counsel, CalPERS "A balanced, insightful, thoughtful, and, above all, useful look at what can be done to create excellent boards." Edward E. Lawler III, director, Center for Effective Organizations, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California "Improving board effectiveness is easier said than done. Building Better Boards lays out the how-tos in a clear and compelling way that is of practical value for directors and CEOs alike." Kenneth W. Freeman, former chairman and CEO, Quest Diagnostics Inc.

Startup Boards

Startup Boards PDF

Author: Brad Feld

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-12-09

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1118516826

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An essential guide to understanding the dynamics of a startup's board of directors Let's face it, as founders and entrepreneurs, you have a lot on your plate—getting to your minimum viable product, developing customer interaction, hiring team members, and managing the accounts/books. Sooner or later, you have a board of directors, three to five (or even seven) Type A personalities who seek your attention and at times will tell you what to do. While you might be hesitant to form a board, establishing an objective outside group is essential for startups, especially to keep you on track, call you out when you flail, and in some cases, save you from yourself. In Startup Boards, Brad Feld—a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist—shares his experience in this area by talking about the importance of having the right board members on your team and how to manage them well. Along the way, he shares valuable insights on various aspects of the board, including how they can support you, help you understand your startup's milestones and get to them faster, and hold you accountable. Details the process of choosing board members, including interviewing many people, checking references, and remembering that there should be no fear in rejecting a wrong fit Explores the importance of running great meetings, mixing social time with business time, and much more Recommends being a board member yourself at some other organization so you see the other side of the equation Engaging and informative, Startup Boards is a practical guide to one of the most important pieces of the startup puzzle.

High Performance Boards

High Performance Boards PDF

Author: Didier Cossin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1119615658

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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.

Startup CEO

Startup CEO PDF

Author: Matt Blumberg

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 1119723663

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You’re only a startup CEO once. Do it well with Startup CEO, a "master class in building a business." —Dick Costolo, Former CEO, Twitter Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it’s difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you’re likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don’t have any control over outcomes. Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees. Startup CEO is not a memoir of Return Path's 20-year journey but a thoughtful CEO-focused book that provides first-time CEOs with advice, tools, and approaches for the situations that startup CEOs will face. You'll learn: How to tell your story to new hires, investors, and customers for greater alignment How to create a values-based culture for speed and engagement How to create business and personal operating systems so that you can balance your life and grow your company at the same time How to develop, lead, and leverage your board of directors for greater impact How to ensure that your company is bought, not sold, when you exit Startup CEO is the field guide every CEO needs throughout the growth of their company.

Inside the Boardroom

Inside the Boardroom PDF

Author: Richard Leblanc

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-02-10

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0470739959

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Distinguished governance experts offer cures for what ails our boards of directors In light of corporate malfeasance in recent years, the governance of corporations has been receiving great attention from regulators, researchers, shareholders, and directors themselves. Based on Richard Leblanc's in-depth five-year study of 39 boards of directors of both for- and not-for-profit organizations, Building a Better Board goes behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of boards of directors, including how they make decisions. Recently chosen as one of Canada's "Top 40 Under 40"(TM), Dr Richard Leblanc is an award-winning teacher and researcher, certified management consultant, professional speaker, professor, lawyer and specialist on boards of directors. He can be reached at [email protected]. James Gillies, PhD (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), is Professor Emeritus at the Schulich School of Business, York University, where he serves as Chair of the Canada-Russia Corporate Governance Program.

Boards That Lead

Boards That Lead PDF

Author: Ram

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1422144070

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Is your firm’s board creating value—or destroying it? Change is coming. Leadership at the top is being redefined as boards take a more active role in decisions that once belonged solely to the CEO. But for all the advantages of increased board engagement, it can create debilitating questions of authority and dangerous meddling in day-to-day operations. Directors need a new road map—for when to lead, when to partner, and when to stay out of the way. Boardroom veterans Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem advocate this new governance model—a sharp departure from what has been demanded by governance activists, raters, and regulators—and reveal the emerging practices that are defining shared leadership of directors and executives. Based on personal interviews and the authors’ broad and deep experience working with executives and directors from dozens of the world’s largest firms, including Apple, Boeing, Ford, Infosys, and Lenovo, Boards That Lead tells the inside story behind the successes and pitfalls of this new leadership model and explains how to: • Define the central idea of the company • Ensure that the right CEO is in place and potential successors are identified • Recruit directors who add value • Root out board dysfunction • Select a board leader who deftly bridges the divide between management and the board • Set a high bar on ethics and risk With a total of eighteen checklists that will transform board directors from monitors to leaders, Charan, Carey, and Useem provide a smart and practical guide for businesspeople everywhere—whether they occupy the boardroom or the C-suite.

The Practitioner's Guide to Governance as Leadership

The Practitioner's Guide to Governance as Leadership PDF

Author: Cathy A. Trower

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-12-17

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1118109872

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THE PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE TO GOVERNANCE AS LEADERSHIP The Practitioner’s Guide to Governance as Leadership offers a resource that shows how to achieve excellence and peak performance in the boardroom by putting into practice the groundbreaking model that was introduced in the book, Governance as Leadership. This proven model of effective governance explores how to attain proficiency in three governance modes or mindsets: fiduciary, strategic, and generative. Throughout the book, author Cathy Trower offers an understanding of the Governance as Leadership model through a wealth of illustrative examples of high-performing nonprofit boards. She explores the challenges of implementing governance as leadership and suggests ideas for getting started and overcoming barriers to progress. In addition, Trower provides practical guidance for optimizing the practices that will improve organizational performance including: flow (high skill and high purpose), discernment, deliberation, divergent thinking, insight, meaningfulness, consequence to the organization, and integrity. In short, the book is a combination of sophisticated thinking, instructive vignettes, illustrative documents, and practical recommendations. The book includes concrete strategies that can help improve critical thinking in the boardroom, a board’s overall performance as a team, as well as information for creating a strong governance culture and understanding what is required of an effective CEO and a chairperson. To determine a board’s fitness and help the members move forward, the book contains three types of assessments: board members evaluate each other; individual board member assessments; and an overall team assessment. This practitioner’s guide is written for nonprofit board members, chief executives, senior staff members, and anyone who wants to reflect on governance, discern how to govern better, and achieve higher performance in the process.

Boards That Deliver

Boards That Deliver PDF

Author: Ram Charan

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2011-03-31

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1118046617

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Finally, a book that brings the vision of truly good governance down to earth. Ram Charan, expert in corporate governance and best-selling author, packs this book with useful tools and techniques to take boards and their companies to a higher level of performance. Charan puts his finger on a growing problem for boards: the disconnect between directors' efforts and their results. The added time and attention boards invest is not translating into better governanceâ??that is, governance that adds value to the business. Boards That Deliver gets beyond the rhetoric of corporate governance reform. It captures the tried-and-true practices used by high-performance boards. In contrast to experts who base prescriptions on number-crunching exercises, Charan identifies the real problems that drain directors' time and suppress their best judgmentsâ??and explains clearly and succinctly how boards can solve those problems. These battle-tested solutions help boards achieve what rules and regulations alone cannotâ??to get succession right, refine a winning strategy, and design a rational CEO compensation package. Good governance requires leadership. Boards That Deliver is the no-nonsense guide for directors and CEOs who are rising to the leadership challenge to make their boards a competitive advantage.

Building Better Boards

Building Better Boards PDF

Author: Seamus Gillen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-07-07

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1399400932

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An examination of the true role of governance as a driver of high-quality strategic decision-making, which can help an organization achieve its strategic objectives more efficiently and effectively. Many boards approach the subject of governance from a compliance perspective, which leaves value lying on the table. When boards complain that “we're spending too much time on governance”, what they're usually referring to is 'compliance'. A compliance focus leads to an emphasis on governance as an area of subject-matter expertise, a cost, an overhead, a back-office activity, something which 'has to be done' to satisfy regulation and Code. It manifests itself through a culture of box-ticking. Directors and senior management perceive, and derive, little value from the exercise. Seamus Gillen believes that governance is a commercial discipline, providing a fundamental underpin to the process of value creation, value protection and value preservation. Governance drives the quality of strategic decision-making that helps an organization achieve its strategic objectives more efficiently and effectively. High standards of governance create competitive advantage, a concept as applicable to not-for-profits and public sector bodies as to commercial entities. For organizations pursuing this approach, governance becomes a liberating theology, and a critical business enabler. Building Better Boards resonates with professionals operating across international jurisdictions, and is inclusive rather than exclusive. The book emphasises, and demonstrates, that governance is a live issue, an ongoing priority area of board focus, with developments occurring around the world on, literally, a daily basis. It identifies good practice and progressive thinking across sectors and geographies. It builds on thought leadership and case studies, as well as regulatory guidance and Code principles. It offers new models and approaches based on real-life experience. All to provide boards and directors - as well as senior executives - with the means to leverage governance to achieve their strategic objectives. To help them lead and succeed in a changing world.

How Boards Work

How Boards Work PDF

Author: Dambisa Moyo

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1541619412

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A New York Times bestselling author and veteran board member offers an insider's view of corporate boards, their struggles, and why they must adapt to survive. Corporate boards are under great pressure. Scandals and malpractice at companies like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, and Wells Fargo have raised justified questions among regulators, shareholders, and the public about the quality of corporate governance. In How Boards Work, prizewinning economist and veteran board director Dambisa Moyo offers an insider's view of corporate boards as they are buffeted by the turbulence of our times. Moyo argues that corporations need boards that are more transparent, more knowledgeable, more diverse, and more deeply involved in setting the strategic course of the companies they lead. How Boards Work offers a road map for how boards can steer companies through tomorrow's challenges and ensure they thrive to benefit their employees, shareholders, and society at large.