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The Savvy Director Blog

Welcome to The Savvy Director™ blog, a place to engage on board governance topics as you travel the path to being a savvy director. 

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You're On Mute!

prepare for meetings Mar 14, 2021

Virtual Board Meetings Post Pandemic

Without a doubt, “You’re on mute” was the most heard phrase during board meetings this past year. I encourage all directors and management people reading today’s blog to stop and take a moment of self-reflection and congratulation for a job well done.

You did this. You managed to get through an entire year of virtual board and committee meetings where few had previously been held. Remember what it was like a year ago? Everyone was...

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What Directors Get Wrong

Last week Ralph Ward interviewed me about how new directors should get ready for board meetings. Ralph is a writer, speaker, and publisher of the online email newsletter Boardroom INSIDER, a source for practical, first-hand advice on better boards and directors.

Since the topic was how to prepare for board meetings, I was more than ready to participate! I never turn down an opportunity to talk about our PREP Framework, a repeatable, reliable process for preparing for board meetings. (Click...

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What Must Go Right?

prepare for meetings Feb 28, 2021

As I worked my way through a lengthy quarterly report recently – complete with tables, charts, graphs, and color-coded dashboard indicators – it occurred to me that there was very little there that would help me to anticipate what might come next.

The report provided lots of detail about what had been accomplished over the past quarter, the past year, and the past several years. From reading the report, I knew exactly where we’ve been been and where we are right now....

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Director Conduct - A Higher Standard

demonstrate courage Feb 21, 2021

Lately there has been a bit of a furor in our local press about a government-appointed board chair who travelled out-of-country, contrary to public health guidelines. There have been dozens of letters to the editor, editorials and opinion columns on the topic, as well as the usual social media storm. All of this ended up with the government changing its position, stating that all appointees must refrain from travelling for leisure purposes or risk losing their positions.

Don’t worry. I...

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Take Your Board to the LAKE

prepare for meetings Feb 14, 2021

The care and feeding of high performing board cultures has taken a hit these past months. This has been observed many times by any number of board directors in my network. I imagine you’ve heard the same comments.

Still, we should feel grateful for our near universal access to affordable virtual meeting software that makes it possible for us to meet in real time with actual faces in front of us and voices in our ears. Can you imagine the alternative experience if all those virtual...

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Getting the Most Out of Committees

The Savvy Director blog usually focuses on the director role as it relates to the board as a whole. But in the past few weeks, I’ve found myself spending far more time on my role as a committee member. And that’s not unusual.

With committee work on my mind, it seems like a good time to write about board committees.

I like to include quotations in these blog posts, so I did a quick Google search on ‘Quotes about Committees’. It pains me to say it, but apparently nobody...

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Larry in the Boardroom

ask great questions Jan 31, 2021

Image from Breakfast with Larry

Have you ever wondered what the late talk show host Larry King would have been like as a board director?

Let’s say the board was questioning the CEO, and that Larry had actually prepped for the board meeting. What kind of questions would he have asked?

Given that one of Larry’s favorite questions for authors was “Why the book?”, I imagine that his fellow directors might have heard him ask the CEO questions like:

  • “What happened...
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Holistic Board PREP

prepare for meetings Jan 24, 2021

We say it all the time – ‘Preparation is the key to success in the boardroom.’ That’s why we call our company DirectorPrep. That’s why our tagline is ‘Ready for your board meeting?’

And that’s why we developed the PREP Framework that provides individual directors with a consistent, repeatable process to prepare for board meetings. We want to support directors to be ready for their board meeting every time. (Visit the PREP for Success page on...

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The Power of Catalytic Questions

ask great questions Jan 17, 2021

If you’ve been reading The Savvy Director blog for a while, then you know that, at DirectorPrep, we are obsessed with questions.

One reason for that is because asking questions helps us to fulfill our fiduciary duty as board directors. Through our questions, we inform ourselves about the subject matter at hand and satisfy ourselves about what is in the organization’s best interests.

Of equal importance, the right questions – asked in the right way at the right time –...

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Do You (And Your Board) Need a Boost?

A couple of days ago, DirectorPrep co-founder Alice Sayant shared with me that her car wouldn’t start. The battery had just enough juice for auxiliary power, but not enough to turn over the engine.

Now, in our part of the world (the Canadian Prairies), a dead car battery is a fairly common occurrence in the middle of a cold winter. But it hasn’t even been that cold (at least, not yet.) And not only is her car parked in the garage, but the block heater (click here if you’ve...

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