by Dennis Mcdonald, Malcolm Richmond, Dick Sibbernsen
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Book Description
The combined experience of McDonald, Richmond, and Sibbernsen—which includes extensive periods working with the boards and senior executives of leading global companies in the U.S., Europe, Australasia, and Asia—offers a unique window into the relationship between boards and management from the valuable perspective of insiders. Reprogramming the Board focuses on what companies need to do in order to gain maximum advantage from a board-management relationship. The book sets the scene by examining the changing role of the board, and suggests what directors and executives might do differently to leverage the activities where their accountabilities intersect. Citing numerous case studies, it then examines an effective board’s involvement in the development of strategy and how the assessment and confirmation of material decisions should work. The authors show how the board has a role in implementing and sustaining ongoing performance enhancement and conclude by examining how the board can best renew itself. The value of this book lies in the frameworks that the authors provide for systematically examining the workings of the board at its interface with management. Illustrated by the richness of case studies, many from their own experience, Reprogramming the Board takes the workings of the board to a new level.
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 a useful contribution to understanding the complex dynamic between a board and its executive team, 2007-01-10
There is a lot to admire in this publication - and a lot which is very distracting - but starting first with the positive. Its authors, McDonald, Richmond, and Sibbernsen, two Australians and an American, have extensive experience working with the boards and senior executives of leading global companies in the U.S., Europe, Australasia, and Asia. Potentially, therefore, they have much to offer in understanding the complex relationship between boards and their executive teams.
They argue that, regardless of the governance model adopted in an organisation, boards need to move from, at best, generalist oversight to a more analytically based interaction with management, with an emphasis more on future outcomes than on past performance. The authors offer a framework for thinking which "provides a basis to guide board input to management thinking, and the way in which a board might increase its comfort with management's ability to deliver what is promised." From management's perspective, the authors contend that their framework "provides a way to communicate both the rationale for its (proposed) actions and identify milestones (that are more than just financial) to give comfort to the board that its activities are on track when quarterly results are under pressure."
This framework is built around five main propositions.
1. That, without a "business concept" (vision, business purpose, etc) to guide it, a company is effectively destined to be short-term and reactive in its actions.
2. That, while the development of the various options to achieve this vision is a management task, if the board does not understand the process followed by management in arriving at the proposal(s) it is asked to approve, it is not only failing in its duty, it lacks the capability to make a reasoned assessment of management's proposals.
3. That a critical role of the board is to assess management's proposals in considerable depth in order to understand the embedded risks and the assumptions behind the expected returns.
4. That, if a board is to have confidence in its management's ability to successfully implement proposed strategies, it must also have an appreciation of management's implementation plans, the critical milestones embedded in those, and the underlying assumptions or changes that might cause them to be modified (or derailed!).
5. That, none of this would be possible without changing how boards are composed, improving their fitness to act and increasing expectations in the assessment of their effectiveness.
The credibility of these ideas is in the underlying recognition that the board has a critical leadership role to play and that it cannot partner effectively with management unless:
* It has clearly articulated (and therefore understood) the organisation's basic purpose (or in the authors' words, the "business concept"); and
* It is capable of understanding (and `dimensioning' the risk of) what is proposed by management in fulfillment of that purpose.
The authors set the scene by examining the changing role of the board, and suggest what directors and executives might do differently to leverage the activities where their accountabilities intersect. Citing (but not referencing effectively) numerous case studies the authors then examine how an effective board would be involved in the development of strategy and how the assessment and confirmation of material decisions should work. They then show how the board has a role in implementing and sustaining ongoing performance enhancement. They conclude by examining how the board can best renew itself.
My earlier reference to `distracting' refers to the publication values of the book. The text is rife with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and most frustrating of all, the absence of references alluded to in the text which would have provided a valuable guide for further inquiry. This book has not received the sort of professional editing and proofreading this material deserves. Hopefully, this will be remedied in later printings.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Great practical guide to increasing board effectiveness, 2006-08-11
McDonald, Richmond and Sibbernsen have come up with a practical guide to reviewing your corporate board's performance and ways to increase the effectiveness of the board and executive management's teamwork.
They mix stories drawn from their considerable corporate experience with straightforward theoretical models that clearly demonstrate the most important issues in the board's performance and its relationship to the executive management team, and company as a whole.
Short of actually asking them to reprogram your board for you, reading and applying the ideas from this book is the best move you can make!
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