The Perfect Board.

• Author: Neel, C. Warren
• Position: Book Review

The Perfect Board

By Calvin K. Clemons

Published by Synergy Books, Austin, Texas, 112 pages, $17.95

LIKE MOST READERS, I was intrigued by the title. The Perfect Board, after all, should be a best seller across the corporate America that I know.

A few pages into it and I knew this would not fit the boardrooms I know, but would fit those who are without experience and are planning to join an association's board or that of a not-for-profit. Thus, a better title for the book would be A Guide for New Members of Association and Not-for Profit Boards.

This is an easy read, with topics presented in a form that includes dialogue with a prospective board member. The topics are concise--in fact, almost too concise to get the context of the issue.

Yet the author does a commendable job outlining topics new board members face if they have had no experience with governance. The topics are presented in a fixed chronological order, almost as following a recipe. The intent was to focus on very large boards of associations, since the material does not capture the boardroom dynamics of publicly traded companies nor the complexities of the post-Sarbanes-Oxley era.

The book does, however, capture some of the duties of a director meeting the characteristic standards of the business judgment rule in decision making. But that is one of the few parallels one might draw if planning to serve on a public board.

The author can be contacted at cneel@utk.edu.

REVIEWED BY C. WARREN NEEL

3. Warren Neel is co-founder of the University of Tennessee's Corporate Governance Center (www.corpgovcenter.org). He recently returned to the university after serving as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration. He had previously been dean of the College of Business Administration. He has served on nine corporate boards in his career and is currently a director of an NYSE and a Nasdaq-listed company.

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