Ideas from the Enter the Boardroom podcast, hosted by Nurole CEO Oliver Cummings
"It's no longer enough just to bring conventional wisdom... With AI you can now get personalised conventional wisdom. So the bar for being a useful board member has risen even higher... The return on being really deep in the company metrics is even higher than it used to be." (25:07)
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"I use my large language model ... to do work, before the board meeting, on the competitive landscape. Who are the outside competitors? What are the innovators doing? Who might be surprise interlopers that would sneak up behind us? What might be macro trends that are going to impact the company?... Doing my research so that I have done my own thinking, so that I can look at the board material with that lens." (34:32)
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"It's almost easy to say, 'okay, I'm on the board, that's my job,' and to stop learning... Get a demo of the products and the technology, and it doesn't matter if half the room glazes over for a while. Once they've had two or three of these deep dives, they don't glaze over any more. They know that they can contribute even without being a technologist." (27:22)
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"Go and sit and answer calls in the call centre. That stayed with me. When I chaired the high-speed fibre company, I went out with the door-to-door sales team and was selling the product on the doorstep, going in with the installation team ... With Frontier now, I avidly read what people are saying in social media and online about our games." (11:40)
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"How do you pick up just one new habit, on a daily basis, on a weekly basis or on a monthly basis, that gives you some exposure to new information?... Maybe it is signing up for a new newsletter, following someone new on LinkedIn, subscribing to a new YouTube channel, or even downloading TikTok when you have no habit of using TikTok." (16:16)
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"I've got better at challenging my own opinion and really thinking what it takes to have an independent point of view, which you don't have when you're an executive." (40:35)
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"We are board members before we are specialists. It is a discipline to be a board member, which is about being curious, being open-minded, interested, and being prepared to change your mind."
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Episode 172 – Danuta Gray: What nobody tells you about the Chair-CEO relationship (2/2) – Listen
Episode 159 – Sir Ian Cheshire: How to be a high-impact board member (2/2) – Listen
Episode 155 – Amanda Mackenzie OBE: From Advertising Executive to FTSE 100 NED: How Amanda Built a Purpose-Led Portfolio Career – Listen
Episode 109 – Professor Stanislav Shekshnia: How to be a good board Chair – Listen
Episode 99 – Sara Weller CBE: Building a plural career across the private and public sectors, representing customers and disability in the boardroom – Listen