News

• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/bl.30043

6 BOARD LEADERSHIP

Board Leadership’s mission is

“to discover, explain, and

discuss innovative approaches to

board governance with the goal

of helping organizations achieve

effective, meaningful, and suc-

cessful leadership to fulfill their

missions.”

Board Leadership aims to ful-

fill this mission by engaging its

readers in a lively and illuminating

inquiry into how board gover-

nance can be made more effec-

tive. This inquiry is based on three

key assumptions:

• Boards exist to lead

organizations; not merely

monitor them.

• Effective board governance

is not about either systems,

structures, processes,

theories, practices, culture, or

behaviors—it is about all of

them.

• Significant improvements are

likely to come only through

challenging the status quo

and trying out new ideas in

theory and in practice.

Uniquely among regular pub-

lications on board governance,

Board Leadership primarily

focuses on the job of board lead-

ership as a whole, rather than on

individual elements of practice

within the overall job.

Over time, Board Leadership

will provide a repository of dif-

ferent approaches to governance

created through its regular “One

Way to Govern” feature.

Here’s what a few of the key

terms we use mean to us:

• Innovative: Creating

significant positive change.

• Approaches to:

principles, theories, ideas,

methodologies, and practices.

• Board governance: The

job of governing whole

organizations.

WHEN WE SAY ...

World Economic Forum’s

Global Risks Report 2016

This fascinating report ranks

risks by likelihood and impact

under the headings Economic,

Environmental, Geopolitical, Soci-

etal, and Technological. This year’s

report identifies the “Disempow-

ered Citizen” as one of the globe’s

three primary risks. You can see

the relevant section on pages

39–49 at http://www3.weforum

.org/docs/GRR/WEF_GRR16.pdf

The Elephant

in the Boardroom

The Global Risks Report was

prepared for the World Economic

Forum’s annual meeting in Davos,

Switzerland, this year. Governance

commentator and consultant Lucy

P. Marcus was there and copre-

sented a session on boardroom

ethics and corporate governance.

Reflecting on the experience, she

notes:

It is easy for companies to see

far-off risks that they cannot

control. It is a lot harder, but a

lot more important, for them to

acknowledge the risks stemming

from how they operate. And

it is harder still to persuade

those business leaders who

do comprehend such risks to

talk about them on a public

stage. That reluctance to speak

openly about how to restructure

corporate governance in a

way that improves stewardship

places all of us at risk.

You can find more of her reflec-

tions and a video of the session at

http://www.project-syndicate.org/

commentary/corporate-governance-

open-discussions-needed-by-lucy-p-

-marcus-2016-02

NEWS

Are Boards Doing the Wrong

Job with the Wrong Tools?

This is the question asked by

Ralph Ward in the February 2016

issue of Boardroom Insider. Point-

ing to a recent series of articles in

the US edition of The Wall Street

Journal examining structural

and membership concerns with

American corporate boards, Ward

wonders if some of the underly-

ing premises are still valid. He

points out that “a century ago,

Henry Ford faced the choice of

either trying to find thousands of

skilled mechanics to hand-build his

popular Model T’s—or reinvent-

ing how they were assembled to

do a better job with less time and

effort.” He speculates that this

“mass production” approach to

board work is only just beginning

and suggests that new technol-

ogy, reporting, and oversight tools

could allow fewer directors, serv-

ing more boards, to offer better

governance. http://boardroom

insider.com/

National Board Chair Study

The Alliance for Nonprofit Man-

agement’s Governance Affinity

Group will shortly be publishing

the results of a study based on

a survey of 635 nonprofit board

chairs from across the United

States. This study sought to

answer two questions: How do

board chairs prepare for their

leadership roles on the board; and

what do board chairs perceive

their leadership roles to be in rela-

tionship to the board, the commu-

nity, and the CEO? You can see an

infographic of the results now at

https://allianceonline.org/alliance-

publishes-one-largest-national-

studies-board-chairs.