An accessible guide to the business of being a board director, through the lens of 18 crucial conversations.
- How do you understand what is really going on in an organisation, so you can exercise the oversight that is required from you?
- How do you overcome the information asymmetry problem, where the executive directors know more about the operation than you do?
- How will you collaborate as a board to set the right strategic direction in a context that changes constantly?
- How will you see the organisation through the eyes of your advisors, your employees and your key stakeholders?
- How can you manage the risks you know about as well as the ones you don’t?
Your best tool for all of this is conversation – about the right topics, with the right people, at the right time. This book shows you what these conversations need to cover and how to make them count. Whether you are a new director of a PLC, a long-standing Trustee of a charity, or a governor of an educational institution, this book will help you and your colleagues become the board your organisation needs.
Kathryn Bishop and Gillian Camm each have many decades operating at board level in listed and private companies, charities, government boards, professional services firms and educational establishments. They have blended this with their experience of selecting, developing, and teaching non-executives, and underpinned it with a carefully curated selection of the most relevant and usable board research together with their own research insights.
Kathryn Bishop CBE FRSA is a director, NED, educator and consultant who has worked with teams in the public, private and voluntary sectors to get difficult things done. She has led organizational change, implemented new systems and processes and responded to crises. As an Associate Fellow at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, she has worked with leaders from across the world to help them to address the challenges they face.
Kathryn’s previous books include Make Your Own Map: career success strategies for women (2021), and the award-winning Board Talk: 18 crucial conversations that count inside and outside the boardroom (2023). She has also written articles for a wide range of publications, as well as a prize-winning case study for business schools. Her website is Kathryn-bishop.com and her Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Bishop.
Gillian runs her own executive coaching and consultancy business, drawing on her extensive experience on boards in the private and public sector, including roles as the senior independent director at Wessex Water, a member the General Medical Council (GMC) and as the first lay chair of the Fitness to Practise Committee. She has also served as Chair of the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and as Chair of the Board of Governors of the University of the West of England. In these roles, she has been actively involved in working with investors, regulators, and consumer groups, and in reviewing and re-developing systems of governance. For example, she led a review of governance of the GMC following the Shipman Inquiry and of university governance in Wales culminating in the publication of the Camm Review in 2019. She has also written for the Journal of General Management and The Financial Times
