The Board Member's Playbook.

• Author: Perro, Vincent C.
• Position: DIRECTOR LIBRARY - Book Review

The Board Member's Playbook

By Miriam Carver and Bill Charney

Published by Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 282 pages, $38.00

MANY BOARD MEMBERS come to their roles with little preparation for the unique and complex challenges they will face. While some will benefit from prior board service and varied orientation experiences, there are few specific guidebooks to assist board members in effectively discharging their stakeholder responsibilities. Miriam Carver and Bill Charney attempt to address this need in The Board Member's Playbook.

Unlike management teams, boards do not have the regularity of contact and cultural commonality that can greatly aid the process of addressing important company matters. Given the diversity of formative experiences that directors bring to their roles, developing protocols, methods, and skills for interacting to address the issues with which they are faced is critical to ensuring effective governance. Too often, the lack of such protocols and methods can lead to board dynamics that result in a poor balance of power, operational meddling, insufficient analysis, and a host of other problems that have been at the root of many of the governance failures that have hit the headlines over the past few years.

This book, which comes with an indexed CD-ROM, is very much a how-to guide. The authors believe that literal rehearsal in preparing to address board matters will make for more effective results. They draw analogies to sports teams, orchestras, and the military to make the case that practice is an essential investment of time if board members are to learn the skills that will make them effective. Their use of the term "playbook" is intended to reference sports teams, for whom the preparation and practice of strategies and tactics that will be deployed in a game are a way of life.

The authors attribute many aspects of board ineffectiveness to a lack of practice or rehearsal. These include perceptions among the governed of capriciousness and being out of touch. Further, the authors attribute failure to make the right decisions and to act in a timely fashion to this lack of practice. In contrast, they assert that with rehearsal, boards are more likely to perform in a more systematic and understandable way that ensures they meet the standards and expectations they set for themselves and their stakeholders set for the board.

Following the "why" of rehearsal, there is a discussion of "how." The second chapter suggests that...