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Uncharted Spaces

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Uncharted Spaces

Reset the agenda. Reimagine the boardroom.

Practical Inspiration Publishing,

15 min read
8 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Learn the ins and outs of boards of directors, including their role and how they’re adapting to innovation.

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8

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Recommendation

What role does a board of directors play? How are current business trends affecting those functions? In this comprehensive text, independent corporate board director Shefaly M. Yogendra draws on her extensive experience to explain the forms and functions of today’s corporate boards. She explores how the trends and innovations rocking the business world have affected the boardroom, how boards are adapting, and what restrictions and issues they face. Executives, board members, investors, and other enterprise stakeholders can all learn something useful here.

Summary

A corporate board helps approve its organization’s strategy, allocate its resources, and support its executive team.

A board of directors’ core duties center around the “serious work of governance” and stewardship. A board approves its organization’s strategies and makes sure it has the resources to achieve its goals. Hard-working directors must carry on through conflict, controversy, and calamity, yet many people – even in the early and middle stages of their careers – set out to become board members.

To enable long-range planning and accommodate busy directors, most organizations set board meeting calendars 18 to 24 months in advance, barring emergencies. The boards of new, rapidly developing organizations may meet more frequently than the boards of established companies.

Board directors have both “statutory and fiduciary duties.”

National laws vary, but generally, board directors must be, at a minimum, mentally fit, honest, and solvent. Various local, national, and transnational bodies have established board directors’ legally mandated (statutory) and fiduciary obligations, though these duties may shift over time.

For example, the ...

About the Author

Shefalay M. Yogendra is an independent corporate board director and committee chair who specializes in technological innovation, governance practices, and risk management. She has written for Corporate Compliance Insights, the Harvard Data Science Review, and other publications.

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