Bob Garratt > Quotes

“effective corporate governance built on the values of accountability, honesty and transparency”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“Direction-givers need a ‘brain-on’, rather than a hands-on attitude.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“Directors’ duties are both to work within the meaning and spirit of the laws and to behave in an ethical manner to their clients.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“board as a whole, there is a particular need to learn how to be comfortable with being constructively critical”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“Every director needs an annual personal development plan agreed with the chairman.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“The key point is that independence of thought is demanded of all directors when on a board.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“profit is the by-product of a successful enterprise not its raison d’être.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“about balancing capitalism with moral sentiment, especially over the distribution and use of profits for the good of mankind.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“Strategic thinking is the director’s role. Planning is an exclusively executive role.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“The chairman must take the lead responsibility for the board development processes.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“That is why effective organizations have monthly board meetings.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“The rule of thumb at present seems to be that directors must not serve more than a total of nine years, three times a three-year service contract.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“Directors need to be happy constructively questioning and criticizing each other,”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“the eternal values of effective corporate governance – accountability, probity and transparency – keep on shining as brightly in this naughty world.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“values must be backed up by observable directoral and managerial actions or they will remain simply an aspiration.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“interactive graphic systems, instead of just lists of numbers, should greatly enhance the quality of boardroom debates.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“the wider consequences of a strategic decision needs destructive testing, especially by the board.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“Risk is essential to an enterprise. If we had full knowledge of the future there would be no risk.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“Executives are there in part to add diversity to board debate through their detailed operational experience. They are not there to act as ciphers of the chief executive.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“If the board is not taking the company purposefully into the future, who is?”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“trying to avoid here is the rush into planning projects and budgets at the expense of strategic thought”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“The board should include a balance … such that no individual or small group of individuals can dominate the board’s decision-making.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“test is: can the key trends be shown to the board on no more than two sides of A4 paper?”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“For organizations to survive and grow, their rate of learning has to be equal to, or greater than, the rate of change in their environment.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“asking discerning questions is a key directoral skill, and the wish to ask them a necessary attitude.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“boards must now be much clearer about their competencies, values and ethics”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“It is why boards were invented, to add sufficiently diverse wisdom to counter a single leader.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“learning audit – on what could be done more, what could be done less, and what is satisfactory.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“It is this short-termism, lack of ownership vision, selfishness and greed that is undermining our capitalist system.”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director

“Customers have ‘moments of truth’11 with an enterprise”
― Bob Garratt, The Fish Rots From The Head: The Crisis in our Boardrooms: Developing the Crucial Skills of the Competent Director