innateprofessionaloversightofbods

To bridge gaps and improve leadership maturity, great corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, innovative, and professional.

In a world of rapid changes, governance is a discipline which continually requires stroking and attention. Otherwise, it will stagnate and lose its ability to steer the business in the right direction.

 The corporate board of directors as the de facto guardians of modern organizations consisting of experienced, insightful, independent, and reputable specialized generalists, plays a critical role in business governance and steering their company in the right direction.


Strategic oversight of business Principle, Planning, Prioritization, Process, Performance, Practice of business management: Corporate governance and management are complementary disciplines to ensure business effectiveness and efficiency. Excessive management complexity enlarges functional gaps, limits performance and slows down change speed. It’s important to look for the linkage between management and governance to unlock business performance rather than overly emphasizing on compliance only. The corporate board's role is to pull management out of the trees to see the forest by enforcing governance disciplines and steering business transformation. The corporate board’s strategic oversight includes co-setting business principles and planning to adapt to the dynamic business environment; scrutinizing business prioritization and processes to improve asset/resource management; monitoring business performance and developing the best and next practices to influence business outcomes.

Technically, corporate governance needs to have direct links to each crucial business management discipline and its processes to make sure that management is doing its job properly. Setting policies is the co-responsibility of the governance body and management team. Implementing policy is a management activity, and monitoring policy compliance is a governance activity. Effective governance ensures that the management stays focused on top prioritized business activities to achieve high performance results and builds a balanced portfolio/program management to build a unique set of business capabilities for unlocking performance. The corporate board’s oversight of key processes at strategic level ensures core processes are “SMART” and dynamic; allows the advantages of standardization, decreases in duplication of efforts, and minimizes risk of violations that can occur.

Systematic oversight of corporate innovation altitude, aptitude, and attitude: Innovation is not serendipity, but a management process. It needs to become an important component of the business strategy in order to present the altitude of innovation impact. Corporate boards as one of the top leadership pillars should practice open-minded leadership, make commitment to support innovation initiatives, create the space for cross-boundary dialogue and debate, set the right risk-taking appetite, tie innovations and the innovative culture to the organization's strategy and scale innovation effect systematically.

Innovation strategy has to be practiced by management in true spirit. Highly innovative leaders or professionals are great in altitude, aptitude, and attitude. The corporate board’s innovation strategy oversight and process/capability scrutinization helps to identify innovation management bottlenecks, de-bureaucratize processes, identify innovators, leverage information technology, derisk innovation implementation, establish clear proofs-of-concept before making the investment to launch and scale. Shift the governance conversation from availability of business resources to the most productive uses for the enterprise's scarce resources and capitals to harness innovation. They can work closely with the management to orchestrate an innovative ecosystem in which employees, customers, channel partners, suppliers, and all other ecosystem participants as active agents can innovate collaboratively to create new concepts, ideas, experiences for innovation to blossom.

Professional oversight of corporate culture, character, competency: Corporate culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior; corporate character means many things, it’s a sort of collective values, attitude, integrity, intelligence, sharpness, dynamism, and reputation, etc. Corporate competency emerges from a blend of collective corporate mindsets, capabilities, and disciplines to take certain activities for achieving business results. The corporate board’s oversight of business culture, character, and competency is to ensure that all different hard and soft success factors are aligned seamlessly to enable strategy implementation, performance improvement, talent development, and reputation building.

By practice, the corporate board and top leadership team sets culture tones, builds up a positive emotional climate, and embeds governance in cycles of the multitude of business management. Reputation is part of the business brand, and the business brand usually reflects the enterprise culture. Corporate reputation management can be at least classified into culture/brand management, knowledge management, or crisis and risk management. The corporate board’s oversight of reputation management is to protect and nurture a strong brand, enhance a healthy knowledge cycle of information-insight-intelligence, improve crisis and risk management effectiveness, and harness corporate value and purposes.

Governance provides monitoring, measuring, and enforcement mechanisms to corporate management. The more complex contemporary organizations become, the broader scope of corporate governance turns out to be. To bridge gaps and improve leadership maturity, great corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, innovative, and professional, oversee business strategy, monitor organizational performance and enforce a strong business brand.

Posted in: Board Room,GRC