Bored Boards Are Bad For Business. Smart Companies Are Fixing That

In at least one way, the esteemed executives who lead the world’s most powerful companies are just like you and me: They get bored at meetings. Particularly at corporate board meetings jammed with mind-numbing show-and-tell from management, stale formalities and the same few aggressive bloviators drowning out effective debate.

Yet these meetings, where chief executives update the board of directors (aka their bosses) on a company’s status and plan for the future, are critical to running a successful company. When a board isn’t paying attention, the consequences can be devastating -- for the company and even for the economy.

Some boards are doing it better, in part because they must. For many decades, most boards were sleepy backwaters stuffed with company insiders who did little more than rubber-stamp the CEO’s agenda. Then at the turn of this century, a series of accounting scandals led to devastating bankruptcies at WorldCom and Enron, which led to stricter laws regulating the boardroom.

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