The Corporate Director Podcast

On this episode, Leah Malone joins the show to discuss PwC’s Annual Corporate Directors Survey. The study surveys over 700 US board directors, making it one of the largest public directors surveys in the country. Three-fourths of the directors are from companies with at least $1 billion in revenue. Leah Malone is the Director at PwC’s Governance Insight Center, and author of the study.

In 2018, 17.5% of the world’s largest 2,500 companies experienced CEO turnover. Notably, that number is up 3% from the year before. Even more notably? The top reason for CEO forced turnovers was misconduct. Jennifer Chatman, Professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkely and Independent Director at Simpson Manufacturing Inc., has dedicated her research to demystifying corporate culture.

Interviewing a professional who truly excels in her work is always a positive experience. But we wouldn’t just say that Anastassia Lauterbach is a professional who excels. Really, she’s a champion who inspires. Anastassia is on the boards of EasyJet and Wirecard and on the Advisory Board for Diligent Institute. She’s also the author of The Artificial Imperative, and is CEO and founder of 1AU Ventures Ltd.

Nearly six years ago, Target experienced a major breach of its customer data. Since then, the conversations in boardrooms about cyber risk could not be more different than they used to be. Back then, people were saying, “Why should boards spend time talking about cyber risk?” Nobody says that now. Instead, the conversation is around, “How much time should the board spend talking about cyber risk?” In this episode, we asked Peter Gleason, CEO of NACD (the National Association of Corporate Directors), to share advice for how directors can stay up-to-date on trends in cyber risk—especially with so many body blows to security constantly coming up in the news.

ESG. Environment, social or sustainability, and governance. There are no clear rules and regulations about ESG--no single definition that everyone is supposed to be following. Not only thinking about ESG but also adopting principles that drive ESG in all aspects of business is especially timely and topical right now. We got to interview Clare Wardle, General Counsel and Company Secretary for Coca-Cola European Partners, about her global take on ESG. “Every one of our environmental targets, we're seeing that that's going to make us a better, more sustainable business,” Wardle said.

One of the main problems plaguing modern governance is too much looking backward and not enough looking forward. Another one is quality of information. If boards have to make decisions based on data, it stands to reason that they should get the most accurate and relevant information possible. That’s what Dottie Schindlinger, co-author of Governance in the Digital Age, got to discuss with Susan Forrester, the chair and director of several listed companies, live in Sydney to celebrate the book.

Corporate boards are under pressure to become more diverse - in age, gender, skill set and more. But younger executives already have full plates, and being a corporate director is becoming an increasingly tough job - one that might seem less attractive to younger candidates than in years past. Are corporate boards heading toward a labor crisis? Why is the director role becoming so challenging (and maybe even unappealing)? We recently sat down with Nora Denzel, a Silicon Valley tech executive who serves on the boards of AMD, Talend Software, and Ericsson, about how things are changing in corporate boardrooms and where we’re heading. “The amount of time that I spend now in public board work, it's probably double what I spent 10 years ago,” Nora said. The game is changing, and directors are challenged to keep up - board composition and performance have reached the tipping point.

The average age of board directors around the world is 63.5 years old, and that number is climbing every year. Which begs the question: how do you digitize the modern boardroom when it appears that boards are getting older and older, and are often hesitant to embrace technology? Why should you bother digitizing your board room at all? Recently, we visited Singapore and had a live taping of an episode of The Corporate Director Podcast with Colin Low, Chairman of the Singapore Investment Development Corporation.

Communication and transparency go hand-in-hand. Some organizations are known for making all of their communications public all the time. Others have reinvented themselves so often, you hardly know which version you’re dealing with. When it comes to internal communication, clarity and transparency are key. We recently sat down with Pamela Coles, a longtime governance professional and currently company secretary of Rolls Royce PLC, to discuss how Rolls Royce is putting into practice some great ideas to drive transparency, information sharing, and a robust organizational culture.

Diversity is an increasingly center-stage topic, in legislation, pop culture, and nearly every work environment. And there’s no place the effects of diversity are more far-reaching than in corporate board rooms. On this episode, we sit down with Erin Lantz and Jonathan Nelson to discuss the facts on board diversity. Truly, there’s no one with more relevant perspectives to discuss these issues than these two guests: Erin Lantz is corporate director of TrueCar, and VP and GM of Mortgages for Zillow Group, and has an MBA from Harvard. She’s also part of what we call next-gen board directors (board members under 50). Jonathan pulls his governance expertise from his 10+ years in governance research for a variety of firms. Currently, he is Head of Research at CGLytics, a corporate governance data and analytics platform that covers over 120K people across 5,000 companies.