Board of Directors 101: How to Run a Meeting

Josh Kopelman recently pointed out an excellent post by Guy Kawasaki on the Art of the Board Meeting. Kawasaki's recommendations are to the point, and right on. These three recommendations in particular struck home, so I wanted to share them:

1. 360-degree views are too big for a board meeting. Focus on this 30-degree view:

• What's going right?
• What's going wrong?
• What do you want the board to do?

2. Don't surprise your board.

• If it's bad news, call everyone in advance to inform them 1:1 and let them vent/cool down privately.
• If it's a new idea or change in company direction, get a discussion going in advance so that you don't have to do a hard sell during the meeting.
• Don't ever assume that the board has read the 60-page document that you emailed them the night before.

3. Build a balanced board, and let your CEO lead its meetings. Kawasaki presents a handful of established archetypes, from the Customer to the Jerry Maguire, that together build a strong support team.

For more information, just head over to Kawasaki's original post. Thanks to Josh for the link!

Comments

[ledretch]

thanks for these basic infos, and the link to GuyKawasaki's original post!

[ledretch]

in fact, I use this way of managing an audience even when I work with a group of patients, during nutritional education. That's why more infos to improve my talents are precious ;)

[Charlie Crystle]

I call everyone in advance regardless, just so I know there's nothing festering, and to make sure everyone's up to date on the general heatlh. This is supported by monthly email reports to investors.

But I've made a few rookie mistakes this year, which by now I should know better. In November I held a board meeting on November 1st. Clearly not enough time to get the October financials done. The second mistake was to send unvetted financials. And there were entry errors, which is embarrassing enough (and pointed to a process problem). And the third was that I didn't get materials to the board with enough time for them to review, which aggravates at least one of them. Oh, a fourth one, which you've heard about from me--get straight on 409A before you decide to have an options pricing discussion. (See Brad Feld's posts about 409A, too).

So some of my rules for the startup CEO:

--talk to board members at least a few days ahead of the call, making sure there are no suprises (for them or for you). If there's something major you need them to get behind you on, let them in on it as soon as you know to get their support. The board meeting should be closer to a rubber stamp of the agenda, plus general discussion. That's assuming you're on plan, of course.

--Send materials a week ahead of the board meeting

--schedule board meetings for the middle or end of the month, not the beginning.

--prep for the board meeting with your team so everyone's on the same page

--keep your team in check; board members don't need to hear every last marketing detail, they just need to know the general picture. They'll ask for more details if it's too shallow.

--take anything contested offline so you can give yourself space to get to resolution, and be able to finish the board meeting. Nothing worse than a 2-hour meeting that goes 4 hours because you failed to 1) get consensus ahead of time or 2) failed to move a debate out of the board meeting.