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Now, more than ever, the world needs transformational leaders not to cultivate change for its own sake, but to lead through the inevitable evolutions in business and human society.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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A high-performing board of directors is the backbone of a successful company.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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To be successful, a Board of Directors must foster a culture of respect and appreciation.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Critical to success in corporate governance is a vision that inspires and motivates employees at all levels.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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By embracing a holistic approach to risk management and conducting regular risk assessments, board members can ensure that their company is prepared to face a wide range of challenges
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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While innovation is essential, it often comes with inherent risks.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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The board's vision sets the standard for leadership throughout the company. By actively promoting and embodying the vision, board members hold management accountable for aligning their actions and strategies with the company's long-term aspirations.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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The business landscape is a constantly evolving ecosystem. Changes in the macro
environment, such as technological disruptions or changing consumer preferences, can
rapidly alter the competitive landscape. A high-performing board needs to be adept at
strategic foresight.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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By mastering the art of corporate governance, board members and executives can unlock the full potential of their organizations, driving innovation, growth, and social impact.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Market leadership, while not the sole definition of success, can be a powerful aspiration for companies and their boards.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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A good Board Of Directors team is one where ideas are flowing fluidly - and where each idea is met with an initial welcome, an intellectual challenge, an expression of gratitude, a rigorous scrutiny and a readiness for action.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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Shaping the company's future requires actively engaging with shareholders and other stakeholders to build trust and understanding.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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A well-structured board meeting begins with a clear and focused agenda.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Like the brain's command center, the board provides the highest level of cognitive function for the organization. They are the "big picture" thinkers, setting strategic direction, overseeing management, and representing the interests of shareholders and stakeholders.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Effective board meetings go beyond mere discussion and information sharing. They should be forums for critical thinking, problem-solving, and strategic decision-making.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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By encouraging a culture of collaboration, open communication, and constructive debate, boards can harness the collective wisdom of their members and make decisions that drive the company towards long-term success.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Emotional intelligence is a crucial aspect of effective board leadership.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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The board chair must be approachable, empathetic, and able to navigate conflict constructively.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Emotional intelligence is a crucial aspect of effective leadership.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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company leaders need to provide their company with a self-organizing and semi-autonomous immune system. Effective risk management isn't about a siloed approach focusing on isolated threats. We have to think more broadly. Effective risk management requires a holistic approach that transcends a siloed focus on isolated threats. In today's interconnected business landscape, risks are rarely confined to a single department or function. Instead, they often ripple across the organization, impacting multiple areas simultaneously.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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By setting clear agendas, facilitating participation, leveraging technology, and maintaining strong communication, boards can transform meetings into strategic forums that propel the company towards long-term success.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Board of Directors members should each bring something unique to the table; and they should share their uniqueness with the rest of the board to inform key decisions.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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Board of Directors members should hold management accountable for performance and ensure the company is operating ethically and responsibly.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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Board of Directors members should actively participate in succession planning to identify and groom future leaders who can ensure the company's continued growth and stability.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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Board of Directors members should provide strategic oversight and guidance to help the company navigate complex market dynamics and chart a course for long-term success. It's about the big picture.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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The boardroom is more than just a meeting space; it's a crucible where the future of a company is forged. It's a dynamic arena where individuals with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives converge to make decisions that can profoundly impact the lives of employees, shareholders, customers, and communities.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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There's no one-size-fits-all answer to defining business success, as different companies can and should prioritize various aspects of success. I advise Boards of Directors to develop a custom framework for the company.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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The dynamics within the boardroom are often complex and multifaceted. Strong personalities, competing interests, and high stakes can create an environment ripe for conflict. Know what I mean? But hereβs the thing; when managed effectively, these dynamics can also lead to robust discussions, innovative solutions, and sound decision-making.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Clearly chairs, or CGOs, have a leading part to play in ensuring that governance boards work in the way the new model outlines. As Carver and Oliver say, "We believe that the chair's role is one of the most important keys to unlocking the potential of boards, and we are therefore going to give it considerable attention." I strongly support the importance that the model gives to the chair's role. This book stresses that the board must speak with one voice and that the CEO takes directions only from the board as a whole. The board will speak with one voice only as a result of directors' commitment to do so and the skill of the chair. I doubt that what is required of a person to serve well on any type of board or committee is a natural form of behavior. The key task of a chair is to enable the members of a board to work together effectively and to get the best out of them. This is what the servant achieved in the story on which Robert Greenleaf's concept of the servant-leader is based. Chairs have a major leadership task. It is they who are responsible for turning a collection of competent individuals into an effective team. The new model is demanding of its chairs, and much will depend on them.
Another field in which
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John Carver (Corporate Boards That Create Value: Governing Company Performance from the Boardroom (J-B Carver Board Governance Series Book 26))
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Digital leaders including board directors today need to understand that the linear management skills are not sufficient to lead todayβs nonlinear digital world with the deep learning curve.
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Pearl Zhu (Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&as)
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Cooperages typically specialized in one or the other because they each had different customer bases and wood requirements. They were often located in major towns to be close to their customers. Slack cooperage demand was more fragmented than tight cooperage, and therefore had a more diverse customer base. While most of the industry was tight cooperage, Greif focused on slack, with the company having the most slack capacity of any player. The cooperage industry had grown increasingly concentrated over time, with the top four companiesβ share of total production increasing from 26% in 1935 to 47% in 1947.66 John Raible acquired control of the company from the Greif brothers in 1913. Raible was a wealthy investor, not terribly interested in the cooperage business. But his leadership was valuable, helping the company grow revenue from $1 million when he took over to $10 million when he took Greif public in 1926. But Raibleβs reign came to an end in 1947, undone by a fellow board member. John Dempsey, an accountant in his early 30s, had joined the firm as a director and company secretary in 1946. After Raible tried to buy shares held by Dempseyβs wife and mother-in-law at a price the young accountant thought too cheap, Dempsey accumulated enough voting shares to take control of the company. Dempsey, claiming to be motivated by Raible calling Greif βmy wood company,β purchased over 50% of the voting shares and made himself chairman.67
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Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
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Below are just a few of the infinite questions that, if asked with high emotion and a deep desire to seek out constructive answers, will stimulate new thoughts to resolve your job and career challenges. By asking courageous questions, your brain will come up with seemingly miraculous answers so that youβll better manage negativity and fear. And when you better manage negativity and fear, youβll be in a much better state of mind to pursue and land your next job. How have others effectively dealt with this problem in the past? How do I turn this problem into an adventure and meet this challenge with a positive outlook? What can I learn from this, and how can I enjoy the process? What resources are available to me in the community that will assist me in getting a new job? What do I need to research to gain better control of my future? Whom can I recruit for my job transition campaign βboard of directorsβ that will advise me and support my efforts in a positive way? How can I be a hero to myself and others by meeting this challenge head-on with confidence and self-respect? Am I spending more time on the solution than on the problem? Am I displaying leadership qualities to the members of my family so they can be proud of me? What do I have to read to make myself a more educated job campaigner? How can I make those I love more comfortable and at ease with my situation? Whom do I have to meet so I can achieve my goals quickly?
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Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
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A Board can be harmonized through leadership humility, insightful business understanding, trustful culture, and learning agility.
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Pearl Zhu
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ultimate responsibility or ownership for protecting information is at the executive leadership and board of directors level.
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Peter H. Gregory (CISM Certified Information Security Manager All-in-One Exam Guide)
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The ability to make rational decisions is limited, or bounded, by the extent of peopleβs information. To broaden employeesβ understanding, a firm should promote a tradition of teamwork and interdependence and develop future leaders by rotating them among work assignments in different departments and geographic locations. In order to reduce structural secrecy, there may be short-term opportunity costs, but the long-term benefits are significant.12 Firms must think about long-term greed and what it means. Through actions and training, leaders must explain the pressures on short-term thinking and how the firm resolves the conflicts of short- and long-term goals. Potentially conflicting or confusing organizational goals, such as putting clients first while also having a duty to shareholders, require strong signals from leadership as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. These nuances cannot be left to statements of principles; they must be modeled by leadersβ actions each day. Leaders must understand that external influences can shape the culture. For example, there are competitive, technological, and regulatory pressures. Responses to them can have unintended consequences, including drifting from principles. This can increase the probability of an organizational failure. An organization needs to understand to what extent models impact behavior, decisions made by business leaders, and organizational culture. For example, boards of directors of public companies should ask questions if earnings per share (EPS) estimates are too consistent with analystsβ estimates. They should ask whether the firm is managing to models or to what is in the best long-term interests of the firm. Leaders get too much credit and too much blame. Leaders need to uphold the firmβs shared valuesβand that is a key component to leadership.13 But too little emphasis is given to the organizational elements that shape behavior or provide an environment for leadership or change. An organizationβs structure, incentives, and values last longer and have more impact than those of individual leaders. Usually when there is a change or loss or failure there is a tendency to blame one thing or one person, when typically there are complex organizational cultural reasons. It is the duty of leaders and board members to examine what is responsible, not who is responsible.
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Steven G. Mandis (What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences)
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I have seen many women gain additional leadership skills by being part of a board of director. It is often a tremendous opportunity and experience while advancing their professional brand through these types of opportunities.
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J.J. DiGeronimo (Accelerate your impact: Action-Based Strategies to Pave Your Professional Path)
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In the absence of those predictions, product and strategy decisions are far more difficult and time-consuming. I often see this in my consulting practice. Iβve been called in many times to help a startup that feels that its engineering team βisnβt working hard enough.β When I meet with those teams, there are always improvements to be made and I recommend them, but invariably the real problem is not a lack of development talent, energy, or effort. Cycle after cycle, the team is working hard, but the business is not seeing results. Managers trained in a traditional model draw the logical conclusion: our team is not working hard, not working effectively, or not working efficiently. Thus the downward cycle begins: the product development team valiantly tries to build a product according to the specifications it is receiving from the creative or business leadership. When good results are not forthcoming, business leaders assume that any discrepancy between what was planned and what was built is the cause and try to specify the next iteration in greater detail. As the specifications get more detailed, the planning process slows down, batch size increases, and feedback is delayed. If a board of directors or CFO is involved as a stakeholder, it doesnβt take long for personnel changes to follow.
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Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
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Nicole Parsons is Board Director for the nonprofit, Choices for Youth. The organization works with at-risk youth throughout Labrador and Newfoundland. She joined Nalcor Energy in 2016 and built a career of more than two decades as a human resource specialist. Nicole lends her voice to advocacy efforts supporting women in leadership and gender equality. She leads through strong ethics and a mind for environments free of harassment.
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Nicole Parsons Newfoundland