an efficient board meeting

Filed in archive Venture Capital on September 15, 2004

Source: http://enau.ee


Ed, whom I had the pleasure to meet last week - is having an excellent down to earth guideline for an efficient board meeting. Well I usually hate huge meetings as usually the slowest guy in the audience is mostly determining the speed of the meeting. This is an area where I love people sticking to the guidelines :-)

"Be prepared: Board meetings are like theater. Like any play, I expect the CEO to have a well thought out and scripted agenda for the meeting. The most efficient way to do so is to lay out an agenda and get feedback pre-meeting from the other board members to ensure that the board covers appropriate topics and allocates the right amount of time for each one. From an update and preparedness perspective, the CEO should always go into the meeting having a complete understanding of where the various board members stand in terms of any major decisions. There should be no surprises. This means that the CEO should have individual meetings and calls in advance of the board meeting to walk each director through any decisions that need to be made and the accompanying analyses behind them."