🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKvAKROiwk4

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And the people all said, “Amen.”

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

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You have had a lot of interesting experiences. The best is when you have a “gray haired eminence” on your board, someone with so much experience and humanity that they can bring the best performance out of the CEO. I have seen this in action.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Also my first CEO/Board relationship created value in prep more than meeting. That was a young “all about me” view of the world. The meeting itself was like a partner dinner at a bad restaurant.

My second was an odd Euro style board with a fiscal meeting and an operational meeting. A great friend introduced me to the Carver Inst. method of Board mgmt. developed for non-profits but with minor modification worked/works great. It keeps the focus on roles, Ends (Board sets with CEO) and Means (delivered by leadership team) If a team member wanted the help of a Board member that was at the that team members request and CEO agreement. Keep board members from overreaching into tactical. It also reminds a Board their one card is termination and can provide good data to do that!
The point is Founders and Funders/Board members all win when Roles are Directly addressed and agreed! Friends, Soft chats about hypotheticals create disasters.

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There is nothing you write with which I fundamentally disagree. It puts a bit more substance into the same discussion.

The point of the post was to provide a bit of thought and guidance as to when a healthy situation fails to materialize and to sound a note of alarm that these things should be processed long before needed.

CEOs come in a lot of different packages — perhaps on this point I am disagreeing with you slightly, but let’s not quibble — and their relative experience is the critical discriminator in this discussion.

When I was twenty years into the CEOing business, I looked at board meetings as an exercise in self-discipline encouraging me to prepare information which was of great utility to ………….. ME.

At the end of every board meeting, I knew the company better than when I began the prep.

I was already routinely seeking guidance on those things that suggested a bit of thought would be useful. I was a member of YPO, TAB, Vistage at various times and had access to peer thoughts. I also had a network of other CEOs.

Your most valuable boardmembers are always going to be former CEOs. Also, the toughest to obtain.

A seasoned and salty CEO becomes his own board much the same way that a high time pilot has a better sense of the performance of his aircraft than a twenty something air traffic controller.

As the Titanic engineers were told, “Only results count.”

In startup world, I do want to say that there is a lot of personal chemistry which is not performance related and the world is replete with stories of arbitrarily terminated CEOs whose replacements did not further the enterprise thereby calling into question the wisdom of the change of leadership.

Being a CEO for the first time is like going to grad school. You learn a lot about yourself and business. After you’ve got the five year pin, it’s actually a pretty easy way to make a living and by the time you’ve done it for ten or more years, you’re actively delegating yourself out of a job.

This is not an original thought. This is something Jack Welch said for years.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

I have often heard the board of friends concept and strongly disagree! A good CEO does may want and at times need a lineman to protect his blind side but if he has no running backs or receivers he has no game. Boards are a time sink if they don’t add some value, the only protection against the unemployment line is performance so I prefer to play offense with a strong board! sharp ness comes from being honed on a strong stone!

First, yup, from general life experience and observation and also from recent politics, I have to conclude that it can be tough to know who the real friends are.

Second, and it can be tough to find an investor who really understands a business that should be worth $1+ billion, unicorn proportions, that is, before the business has been built and before even a one person CPA accounting firm can tell.

For

acquiring all the freely floating currency in North America.

So, that would be deflationary, right? So, print more money!

About an investor, why so “tough”? Well, we’re talking:

In the course of doing this, the entrepreneur will solve a huge pain problem for the world or create an insanely powerful new idea.

and where maybe the entrepreneur will create just such an idea just to be able to solve just such a problem. So, we’re talking new, powerful, and valuable but before the CPA can agree with any evaluation above $0.00.

Or, for why, we’re talking $1+ billion, unicorn proportions, and such successes are necessarily rare. Then the fraction of people who can accurately evaluate such rare things is necessarily tiny.

And if such an entrepreneur is fully successful, he will discover that he doesn’t have much company, not many real colleagues. It can be tough for him to know who his real friends are, and, the more his pride has him show off his success and money, the tougher for him to know.

E.g., it can be so tough that for the

get their pictures on the cover of Fortune and Forbes,

those may be one of the last things they want to do.

Or they may be willing to give some big bucks just to get back the easy anonymity they had before their success.

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/point-view-entrepreneurs-v-funders/

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com