Book Review: High-Performance Boards
Authored By Didier Cossin
Evolution is a strange bed-fellow. When one dines with natural selection and leans hard on the essential principles of survival, there’s a sense of governance, as if life in these variable replications is managed tightly, with a grip of controlling aversion to the possibilities of unlimited growth potential. And yet, the fundamental relevance of such transformational leadership equates significant opportunity.
While reading this book, I decided to take it along on an excursion to the park. But I found myself putting the book down occasionally to stare at the clouds and think about the concepts discussed in the chapters. What makes a successful director? What makes board members accountable for their decisions and leadership? Good judgment, duty, loyalty? Integrity. Understanding these basic values and knowing where they fall in the matrix of leadership is important as we generate high-performance boards for growing companies.
Nurturing quality, loyalty, and relevant growth in new companies means understanding the historic value of management operations in older companies. Experience matters.
Expertise and competence are relevant in any board, as are diversity and general innovation. We need all these characteristics on the board to help create the kind of governance that builds strong companies. Adapting and acknowledging all these bits of skill and information within a developing board is relevant to company growth. I found the charts and diagrams in the book helpful in understanding each phase. The textbook style processing and development of this book reminded me that learning is a lifelong process, and we should always pursue developmental greatness.
The practical cognitive testing within the sections of the chapters could benefit nearly any developing process in creating a profoundly viable board. Those tactics allow access to information, and the assessment of information to be co-reactive operations in the development process. Such strategies offer advanced risk assessment and prevention of failure with governance.
Such quantitative techniques allow for authentic communication and robust crisis management. These ideologies separate conflicting issues and social dynamics allowing for natural arbitration to take place. I found the oversight of fraud risk and problematic culture to be an effective response to the broader notion of upward mobility within the corporate structure. Everyone wants a better job, but to get it you need to earn it. Within the board, I found that truth to be unequivocally legitimate.
Overall the due diligence of selecting a board with the ability to serve through strategic analogies, making relevant decisions, and with minimal risk to the corporate structure becomes possible through the use of the concepts within this book creating a dynamic relevance for reading and applying the book to such decision making efforts. By knowing and understanding what is expected of the decision-makers on the board, those with oversight and selection capabilities will be more effective in selecting the right members to the board.
This book is a reminder that bureaucracy matters and the choices made at the top of the corporation have a profound impact on the lower echelons of any business. I recommend this book to anyone who is a decision-maker in any business operation.
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4 Stars -