Back to the Drawing Board

What use are boards of directors and how to optimize their operation? To answer this question, the authors of this book start from an often neglected but capital fact: very limited resources are available to board members to carry out their duties. They must thus make choices among the missions they decide to take on, the key to performance being their ability to implement these choices in a disciplined manner.
Showing great zeal for detail – concerning the organization of board meetings, board member interactions, etc. – this book stands out in its views on a number of currently popular ideas, such as when it recommends engaging directors based on their skills, even if their independence from the company may not always be optimal (chapter 6), or when it asserts that the presence of many acting CEOs on the board is no guarantee of performance, and can even cause major problems (chapter 5).
Although the whole book is pleasant and enriching, readers in a hurry may want to skip to chapter 9 for a quick summary of the main conclusions.