The book discusses the useful tool and techniques which take boards and their companies to a higher level of performance. It is a guide for the directors and CEOs who are rising to the leadership challenges to make the board a competitive advantage
Corporate Governance is one of the hottest management and business subjects that is doing rounds today. While board watchers in general is obsessed with the processes and structures used by the board (labeled as "inputs" by Charan), Charan focuses on the values that a board adds to a corporation (labeled as "outputs" by Charan). According to him, "boards' practices are a means by which it can perform good governance, not ends in and of themselves". While boards have, of late, changed for the better, many of them have not been successful in living up to their potential of providing truly good governance which actually results in the actual performance improvement in the corporation, rather than just preventing misdeeds from happening. Boards shall move away from being merely active and in full compliance to making an important contribution to the business.
Charan has been refreshingly different in his ideas on corporate governance in that he does not concentrate on searching and trying to establish whether there exists any statistical correlation between corporate performance/market performance and corporate governance but focuses on what happens behind the curtains. His first work on the subject, namely, Boards At Work (Jossey-Bass,1998) also tried to analyze board functioning from an angle that is different from conventional board watchers by concentrating on the ability of companies to unlock the intellectual power of the board to help the CEO and management to perform better. In this latest book, Charan tries to analyze a growing problem for boards in general: the disconnect between directors' efforts and their results. According to him, the added time and attention boards invest is not translating into better governance- governance that adds value to the business. In contrast to the generic board watchers who offer solution/prescriptions based on statistical analysis, Charan identifies the real problems that drain director's time and suppress their best judgments and offers clear explanation on how boards can solve these problems. |
