Bill George on transitioning a board's makeup.

• Position: BOARD COMPOSITION

Ed. Note: On April 24, 2014, in a black-tie ceremony, Bill George, former chairman and CEO of medical technology company Medtronic Inc. and now a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, is to receive the 2014 Bower Award for Business Leadership. Presented by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, the award recognizes extraordinary business leadership. It specifically recognized George for "his visionary leadership of Medtronic, his promotion and writings on corporate social responsibility and leadership, as well as his extraordinary philanthropic contributions to education and health care through The George Family Foundation."

The Franklin Institute awards program, founded in 1824, is among the oldest and most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed in the United States. Past Bower Award honorees include Bill Gates, Gordon Moore, David Packard, James Burke, Roy Vagelos and Michael Dell. In a Directors & Boards article in 2001, while he was leading Medtronic, George wrote about the Medtronic board and its evolution. A passage from that article follows.

Building a great board is a most difficult task. It takes a great deal of time on the part of the board members and the CEO. But it is the key to a strong system of corporate governance.

In Medtronic's early days our founder Earl Bakken recognized that he lacked business expertise. He wisely reached out to a very sophisticated group of local business executives and asked them to join the board of his fledgling company. Over time these board members brought in more outstanding board members from local companies like Pillsbury, General Mills, Target and others. As the company went through the stages of growth from a start-up to a medium-sized corporation, the board was invaluable to Earl in helping him build Medtronic and in anticipating the challenges of a larger company.

It wasn't until 1980 that Earl agreed to bring the first physician onto the board, Dr. Glen Nelson, a local surgeon who was CEO of American MedCenters, one of the first HMOs in the U.S. Earl feared that a physician would dominate the group of businessmen on the board with his opinions about medicine. Actually, the lack of medical expertise on the board led to several major strategic mistakes and the missing of important new technologies, such as angioplasty and the implantable defibrillator.

Another unusual aspect of the Medtronic board in those days is that it became the source of executive...