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High Performance Boards: Improving and Energizing your Governance
A comprehensive guide to transforming boards and achieving best-practice governance in any organisation.
When practising good governance, the board is the vital driver of organizational success, while fostering positive social impact and economic value creation. At all levels, executives around the world are faced with complexities rising from disruptive business models, new technologies, socio-economic changes, shifting political circumstances, and an array of other sources. High Performance Boards is the comprehensive manual for attaining best-in-class governance, offering pragmatic guidance on improving board quality, accountability, and performance.
This authoritative volume identifies the four dimensions, or pillars, which are crucial for establishing and maintaining best-practice the people involved, the information architecture, the structures and processes, and the group dynamics and culture of governance. This methodology can be applied to any board in the world, corporate or non-profit organization, regardless of size, sector, industry, or context. Readers are introduced to a fictitious senior board member – an amalgamation of board members from well-known organisations – and follow her as she successfully handles real-life challenges with effective governance. Drawn from the author's 20 years of practice and confidential work with boards across the world, this
Demonstrates how high-performance boards innovate and refine their practices Discusses examples of board failures and challenges, including case studies from both for-profit and non-profit organisations including international organizations and state-owned agencies or even ministries Provides a proven framework to create best-in-class governance Includes a companion website featuring tools for board assessment and board practice High Performance Boards has inspired more than 3000 board members around the world. This book is essential reading for professionals and managers interested in governance and board members, senior managers, investors, lawyers, and students of governance.
When practising good governance, the board is the vital driver of organizational success, while fostering positive social impact and economic value creation. At all levels, executives around the world are faced with complexities rising from disruptive business models, new technologies, socio-economic changes, shifting political circumstances, and an array of other sources. High Performance Boards is the comprehensive manual for attaining best-in-class governance, offering pragmatic guidance on improving board quality, accountability, and performance.
This authoritative volume identifies the four dimensions, or pillars, which are crucial for establishing and maintaining best-practice the people involved, the information architecture, the structures and processes, and the group dynamics and culture of governance. This methodology can be applied to any board in the world, corporate or non-profit organization, regardless of size, sector, industry, or context. Readers are introduced to a fictitious senior board member – an amalgamation of board members from well-known organisations – and follow her as she successfully handles real-life challenges with effective governance. Drawn from the author's 20 years of practice and confidential work with boards across the world, this
Demonstrates how high-performance boards innovate and refine their practices Discusses examples of board failures and challenges, including case studies from both for-profit and non-profit organisations including international organizations and state-owned agencies or even ministries Provides a proven framework to create best-in-class governance Includes a companion website featuring tools for board assessment and board practice High Performance Boards has inspired more than 3000 board members around the world. This book is essential reading for professionals and managers interested in governance and board members, senior managers, investors, lawyers, and students of governance.
324 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 9, 2020
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39 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 5, 2020
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 -
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.
###
4 Stars -
October 20, 2020
Amidst the cacophony of anecdotal papers in the area of corporate governance, this book attempts to put all key issues inside a single cover. "...there are four pillars to a board's effectiveness: outstanding directors with the right focus and dedication; sophisticated information architecture, internal and external, formal and informal; the long list of structures and processes, all developed with clarity and sophistication; and healthy board dynamics and culture, based on the right values, including integrity and, accountability and constructive dissent."
I loved the succinctness of Four Pillars in covering vastness and fuzziness of Corporate Governance. The icing on the cake for me chapter on Stewardship But that could be attributed to my being a self-proclaimed Positive Psychology enthusiast and practitioner of Appreciative Inquiry; for, in a world the excessively focused on Agency Conflict the least we need is more of that
But for repetitiveness and preachy segments, I would have given it an even higher rating.
I loved the succinctness of Four Pillars in covering vastness and fuzziness of Corporate Governance. The icing on the cake for me chapter on Stewardship But that could be attributed to my being a self-proclaimed Positive Psychology enthusiast and practitioner of Appreciative Inquiry; for, in a world the excessively focused on Agency Conflict the least we need is more of that
But for repetitiveness and preachy segments, I would have given it an even higher rating.
October 4, 2022
I have interest in board activities last 20 years. Participating more then in 10 boards, having 3 courses in different unis, I could say that this book is very valuable source.
Let’s start from the style. Book is written in 3 different sections:
1.Dialogue from fresh new board enthusiast with his very experience colleague who shared with him her wins and fails.
2.Systematic set of all needed theoretical material about boards: from risk management to M&A. From how to avoid the frauds and it’s reason of appearance to leadership pipeline.
3.Cases of the big and medium companies, most of them very well known, which shows perfectly role of the board.
Finalizing the review I want to mention the response of the experienced colleague to freshman board member:
“The first is: is this a good board which I want to be part of?
The second is: am I good for this board?”
Let’s start from the style. Book is written in 3 different sections:
1.Dialogue from fresh new board enthusiast with his very experience colleague who shared with him her wins and fails.
2.Systematic set of all needed theoretical material about boards: from risk management to M&A. From how to avoid the frauds and it’s reason of appearance to leadership pipeline.
3.Cases of the big and medium companies, most of them very well known, which shows perfectly role of the board.
Finalizing the review I want to mention the response of the experienced colleague to freshman board member:
“The first is: is this a good board which I want to be part of?
The second is: am I good for this board?”
July 7, 2020
Best book on boards I have ever read!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews