Before the main course –
Do you recognise this board? Directors arrive shortly before the scheduled start; you take your places, open your board packs and work your way through the agenda, item by item; as the chair closes the meeting, you shut your pack, gather your iPad and phone, and head to the taxi. Other than exchanging a few pleasantries when you take a break for coffee, you barely make eye contact with the other directors, let alone speak to them individually.Perhaps you’ve had some good discussion and made so...
August 3, 2023The shift we’ve been expecting in Air New Zealand’s strategy?
Has Air New Zealand’s market strategy changed – or is it simply now more obvious?I’ll start by saying that I have been a relatively frequent, usually satisfied, flyer with Air New Zealand for a long time (my Frequent Flyer number has five digits and I’ve accumulated 14 ‘banked years’ of membership).In the last three years, every airline in the world has faced challenging headwinds and has had to make tough choices. A couple of stories about our national airline in the last fortnight ...
February 27, 2023No such thing as ‘Invisible Leadership’
Photo: RNZ / Katie Todd...
January 30, 2023Four times twice as much: how the Chair’s job has grown
The latest edition of the Australian Company Director magazine quotes a senior board chair describing how the role has evolved in recent years:‘Where once the rule of thumb was that the chair did three times the work of a non-executive director (NED), they now do four times the work of NEDs, who in turn are working twice as hard as they used to.’For the mathematically challenged, I think she’s saying that a board chair today has about eight times the typical workload an NED had, only a few...
November 27, 2022Ten minutes that will transform your (Zoom) board meetings
I’d guess that most of us have held more board meetings virtually than in person over the last 18 months. Remote meetings, still a rarity two years ago, are business as usual and here to stay.We’re learning how to make the most of them: To interpret non-verbal signals (aka body language) from only our colleagues’ faces; To stop people talking over each other, most of the time;And to manage the unusual constraint that everything we say and every facial gesture is seen by everyone ...
September 16, 2021The three levels of medalling, in board diversity
Over that inspiring fortnight of distraction, the Tokyo Olympics, two new verbs have joined the mainstream, as in ‘I can’t believe we’ve medalled... we were only aiming to podium at the next Games.’ As those verbs have entrenched themselves in the sports lexicon, so ‘diversity’ has become possibly the most discussed, most abused and most poorly understood term in board vocabulary. Let’s look at diversity in the language of the last few weeks: ...
August 26, 2021When your board member is the subject expert: three hidden traps
How often do we hear boards discussing the type of skills they’d like to attract … ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had an engineer/micro-biologist/blockchain expert on the board?’I’m fully in favour of making sure our boards have people with the right skills and experience for the business. We’ve all heard of corporate train-wrecks where their absence has been a factor: insurance companies with no insurance or risk experience; building companies with no construction experience; ev...
July 5, 2021When the Chair wants to become the Boss
Last week the New Zealand Herald revealed that, among candidates for the chief executive’s role at Greater Wellington Regional Council, the current Council Chair Daran Ponter had thrown his hat into the ring.It’s far from the first time that this has happened, not only in local government, and it can work perfectly well – as long as the process is handled fairly and impartially. The first problem the Council faces, of course, is that the Chair is the person most likely to have be...
March 22, 2021The (other) Rule of Six – and the mistake we make in using it
Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced the ‘Rule of Six,’ limiting gatherings to six people, in order to slow the spread of Covid-19. This brought to mind the older ‘Six Block Rule’ that directors have used to guide them on their capacity to accept new roles. The ‘Rule’ proposes that, in general, a competent director can manage up to six full board positions (blocks) at any time, with a chair role counting as two blocks, and a committee chair as one-and-a-half. It...
September 14, 2020The Four Levels of Board Maturity … and what you need to do about yours
Some people tower over their profession: Albert Einstein – physical sciences, Chuck Yeager – test flying, Florence Nightingale – nursing (and statistics – check her out). In corporate governance, few are as respected as Professor Bob Garratt, author of ‘The Fish Rots from the Head’. It’s an excellent metaphor to illustrate his discussion of board leadership, albeit, as a marine biologist once advised me, biologically incorrect. Professor Garratt is one of the western worl...
July 28, 2020Who saw that coming? The A.R.T. of Risk Governance
I don’t suppose any of us fully anticipated what we, and the rest of the world, have experienced in these last few months. Most of our boards have well considered and often colourful risk registers, which they review regularly. So why was this coronavirus such an ambush? How many registers contained something like: ‘Global pandemic, forcing us to close our business, and generate zero revenue for several weeks’? Perhaps many Chief Risk Officers were too nervous to present an...
June 25, 2020 Posts 1-11 of 11 | Page