This book raises the performance bar for boards and directors, and empowers them to raise the performance and achievement bar for the organizations they serve.
Boards That Excel urges directors and companies to move beyond today s prevailing good governance standards, and provides actionable, evidence-based guidance on how to get there. While good governance principles suggest that boards should focus on oversight and monitoring, great governance sees those standards as just a merely adequate baseline responsibility. Most books in this field focus on this baseline, and are primarily about directors legal duties and obligations and the basic monitoring of management. Some books take a step beyond that into areas such as facilitating strategy development but tend to rely on generic (albeit valuable) formulas. This book acknowledges baseline requirements. But B. Joseph White asserts that stewardship requires the board to set higher aspirations for itself and the organizations they serve. And with higher aspirations, boards need to go about their work in the right way to support and enable high achievement from the CEO on down.
White prescribes an overarching goal for boards, defining their core purpose: to ensure the organization s ability to control its destiny. If boards do that, they clear the way for leaders to make decisions based on with what they think they should do, not what they are forced to do. He helps directors understand the enterprises they oversee as well as their roles and responsibilities. He defines and describes the vital substance of board work as well as the process to accomplish it.
Many governance books speak to current and prospective directors as if they were students, not accomplished professionals. In Boards That Excel, the author connects peer-to-peer. He inspires higher aspirations with the overarching framework, and brings four critical pieces together to enable directors to achieve their goals."
