How to manage board meetings was one of the most interesting sections discussed by Eric Schmidt, Alan Eagle and Jonathan Rosenberg in their book “Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell”.
Maybe the reason is rooted in my naive view of the world, but I saw a lot of commonalities with family business meetings between family members or I just projected my personal experiences into this section.
What is a board meeting?
A board meeting is a formal meeting of the board of directors of an organisation and any invited guests.
How is a board meeting structured?
Based on the company size and stage you have different approaches.
If we look at the startup world for example a Board Meeting during the Series A phase, and earlier, tends to be informal with bi-weekly or bi-monthly frequency.
In a Series B stage the meeting is more structured with a regular cadence, every quarter with all meetings scheduled a year in advance (only in person).
In this article I won’t discuss how to choose board members, but I am going to craft some notes from the book.
In this article I won’t discuss how to choose board members; instead I’m going to craft some notes from the book.
Bill Campbell On Board Meetings
Bill Campbell was officially sitting on the board of a few companies, Apple was one of them, but informally he was often invited to the board meetings of the most important silicon valley companies.
Not only, he lived this experience from both sides of the table thanks to his history as a CEO at Claris, GO and Intuit.
Bill Campbell was an incredible character who moved from being a football coach to senior executive in Fortune 500 in less than 5 years.
The First Rule
Bill had several best practices on how to run a board meeting, but first rule was the following:
The CEO manages the board and the board meetings, not the other way around.
The Second Rule
The second rule was to open the agenda with operational updates answering the question “How the company is doing”:
- Financial and Sales Reports
- Product Status
- Hiring, Communications, Marketing, Customer Support metrics
Preparing for the board meeting meant that much, a preliminary document was always draft and sent in advance.
Why?
Because in that way you will save people time, avoiding a lot of not-strategic questions during the meeting.
Bill expected people would read the shared documents ahead.
Expected meant EXPECTED.
The Chegg Case
In Chegg, an educational technology company, Dan Rosensweig, the CEO and Bill’s coachee, had a guy on his board who wouldn’t read anything and waste people’s time asking questions already discussed in the pre-read.
At the end, the guy, after several occasions where he showed this consistent behaviour, despite the information packed a week ahead with the exact pages to look highlighted, was fired.
A moment for Lowlights
An interesting aspect of board meetings is the lowlights discussion.
Company lowlights represent a moment of discussion on what didn’t go well, what is threatening the business or where the CEO needs help.
I can say generically “you must spend enough time on this aspect because it is important.” but it would not be enough to understand how critical it is.
To give an idea of how important lowlights are, you have to know that Erich Schmidt, while running Google, often rejected an initial draft of the board lowlights, because they were not honest enough.
Not only, in Google it was the product manager’s responsibility to draft them, not something to be left to support functions like finance, because it was a critical activity.
This is the only way the company can get real help.
But why are they so important?
From research from Harvard Business Review published in 2002 emerges that “virtuous cycle of respect, trust and candor” is a key driver for building “great boards”.
How to choose who should be on the board?
The book is very concise on this point.
“Smart people with good business expertise who care deeply about the company and are genuinely interested in helping and supporting the CEO”.
I really suggest reading more and collecting more information.
If you want to know more about Board Meetings in the startup world I also recommend this articles:
- Sequoia Ventures – https://articles.sequoiacap.com/preparing-a-board-deck
- A16Z – https://a16z.com/what-now-board-meeting-or-bullsht/
- Y Combinator – https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3w-how-to-create-and-manage-a-board
- Y Combinator – https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5J-how-to-create-and-manage-a-board-part-2
- Steve Blank on Board Meetings https://steveblank.com/2011/06/02/reinventing-the-board-meeting-%e2%80%93-part-2-of-2-virtual-valley-ventures/
To Wrap-up
I think the key lesson learned is to “do your homework” and “be accountable”. It is not a new concept, but always important to reinforce.
I am going to apply these principles in my future annual meetings for the benefit of the company and the people involved.
