Board Intelligence

Our mission is to help all boards and leadership teams to be a powerful driver of performance and a force for good. WHERE IT ALL STARTED Good leaders, bad information. It all began back in 2008, sitting in the back of the room as a consultant, watching a successful FTSE 250 conduct its board meeting. They had a high-calibre board and some big strategic challenges: it was set to be a great meeting. And yet it wasn’t. For four hours, the board members pored over papers filled with backwards-looking financial and operational data. They didn’t talk about the things that mattered. That’s when the penny dropped. No matter how capable the people are, a board is only as good as its information. Information drives the conversation. But why did fixing this matter to us enough to pin our careers to it? Because of the other thing we learned from this board: was that if they’d been having the conversations they wanted to be having, everyone stood to gain. As well as long-term value creation, they were concerned about reports of a climate crisis, growing wealth inequality, and the wellbeing of their workforce. Later, we polled a few hundred directors to ask what they felt was missing from their boardrooms and they echoed these concerns. Most business leaders want to do a good job, not just for themselves and their shareholders, but for wider society too. Our journey to enabling this had begun.