Bob Garratt is a company chairman, consultant, and academic working on corporate governance, board and director performance and strategic thinking issues. He is a veteran of 25 years, is based in London, and works on five continents.
Garratt maintains that directors’ ignorance of their rights, duties, roles and tasks, combined with weak chairmanship, ensures abuse of the key corporate direction-giving process around the boardroom table. His book “The Fish Rots From the Head” is reviewed at the Chartered Management Institute and at Amazon.
He advises that board function and dysfunction are fundamentally related to attitudes and behaviours closely related to integrity and accountability. By consequence, a board that demonstrates the capacity to self-question, to self-criticize, and to accept to be questioned and criticized, all with equanimity, is a highly functional board. Its members share a culture of valuing learning – including learning from mistakes – and if it became apparent to such a board that it needed to learn more, or to alter its practices, it would attend to those needs. A nice section from “The Fish Rots From the Head” was accessible from this link.
- the illusion of invulnerability
- collective efforts to rationalize
- unquestioning belief in the board’s inherent morality
- stereotyped views of rivals and enemies
- direct pressure on dissident board members
- self-censorship of deviations from apparent group consensus
- a shared illusion of unanimity
- the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards
Let us therefore intervene, so as to address directors’ ignorance of their rights, duties, roles and tasks, and to address weak chairmanship, so as to cut down on abuses of key direction-giving around our boardroom tables.