A Field Guide to Better Boards.
Forty-one routines for the chair’s desk drawer — terse, unsentimental chapters on agendas, dissent, and the questions that keep a board truthful.
One routine per sitting, debatable monthly
Every chapter tackles a single boardroom habit — the consent agenda with bite, minutes with a memory, the opening question the papers skip — and handles it in pages, not tomes. Directors read a chapter monthly and argue it through together; many boards buy per member and labour through the year.
Now in its third printing, it stands as the hands-on sibling to The Deciding Room: less diagnosis, more practice.
- Published 2021 · 196 pages · available wherever books are sold.
- Board sets pair naturally with a board effectiveness review.
- Event pairings combine with any signature keynote for delegate packs.
Three habits the guide drills deepest
01 · Agendas
Parting verdicts from debates on the page, so focus lands where only the board can move.
02 · Dissent
Shifting objection from hallway to chamber: customs that render disagreement safe and productive.
03 · Minutes
Records that remember: verdicts, owners and dates caught so delivery outlives the quarter.
Continue with the companion pieces
The Deciding Room
The later volume: nine chapters on judgement under strain, drawn from twenty years of fieldwork.
Board Attention at a Development Bank
A field note catching several of these routines at work inside a genuine boardroom.
Governing What You Cannot Predict
The keynote for boards prepared to practise the rupture instead of predicting it.
