Proportion of the time that diverse teams make better decisions than individuals Rebecca Burn-Callander p16
707,000
Graduates in the UK that are out of work and on benefits MaryLou Costa p58
85
Minimum age businesspeople must be to have experienced a world as unstable as today’s Roger Dennis p72
11,500
Reponses from creators to the government’s 2025 consultation on AI and copyright Matt Packer p48
7
Number of ice warnings Titanic received before she sank Ben Walker p12
Letter from the Editor
S
ometime in the mid-1700s, Jonathan Swift penned a treatise on the social glue that binds organisations. “Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse,” he wrote. “Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company.”
Good manners are as essential now as they were in Swift’s day. Board members have a difficult job. They are – or should be – allied with the ambitions of the company they represent; have its best interests at heart. Yet they must also be in full command of their critical capacities, prepared to ask the probing questions that help firms innovate – or spare them from disaster. Yet such exploration is not without risk. As the author Benjamin Verrall says (page 12): “People don’t want to feel like they are being attacked with a question.”
Verrall proposes several ways of ensuring that those being questioned open up rather than clam up. There is a way of conversing that enables exploratory dialogue while ensuring those interviewed remain at ease.
master. The evidence is that manners are too often misplayed. Social pressure to conform – with authority, the status quo, or both – is confused with politeness. Complacency and credulity ensue. Intelligent people are rendered not insightful, but incurious. Instead of innovating for success, their companies succumb to groupthink, unaware of the opportunities – and threats – that surround them (see page 16).
Curiosity is the lifeblood of a highperforming board. Without it, executives can quickly become too faithful to their instincts. Confidence is not an unalloyed virtue (page 28). The behavioural psychologist Amanda Knight’s leadership development assessments reveal that misunderstanding combined with high confidence is one of the highest risk-profiles for decision-making. Moreover, excessive confidence can itself actively diminish curiosity. If we are sure we are right, why delve further?
Sometimes, the delving never even begins. There is a litany of cases – corporate and otherwise – where the worst happened because too few were willing to ask the most powerful question on Earth: ‘why?’ Projects gathered steam before anyone had tested the thinking behind them. Curiosity emerged too late, if it ever emerged at all. Inquiry was too often traded for polite acquiescence.
Yet good manners, well played, have the opposite effect. A company made at ease with answering questions is a company that is more likely to succeed. “As the best law is founded upon reason, so are the best manners,” Swift concluded. The answers we need to drive our companies forward are somewhere. The right questions, asked the right way, will find them.
Swift was right that such discourse is an art. But it is an art that many are yet to Ben Walker is editor of Director
In this issue Summer 2026
PERSPECTIVE
Ideas and insights from industry
blueprint Company direction demands a practical mindset. Perfect isn’t possible. Better is
about managing with
Leaders need to be real people. Your firm needs you – not a false projection
The evidence is clear: diverse boards make better decisions. Similarity is a ticket to failure
Your next director might be digital. Are humans necessary?
Collective intelligence needs careful composition. Here’s how to do it
There
The Liberal Democrats’ Daisy Cooper on high-street economics
40 Cautionary tales with Roger Barker
Most boards believe they can anticipate a crisis. Many have been proven wrong
42 Gen Why
Meet the millennial women who are driven by something greater than profit
48 Attack of the clones
Creators are fighting back in the battle over AI copyright
Floor or aw? Should it be cheaper to hire the young?
54 Marketing mytholo with Chris Daly
No, advertising and marketing are not the same
Critical challenges facing firms
58 The pipeline paradox Firms are self-sabotaging their futures by devolving junior roles to AI
62 End of conversation
Talking is falling out of fashion. Let’s bring it back
66 How to say it with Anthony ‘Tas’ Tasgal
Once upon a time in a story…
78 Book club Director’s selected summertime reads
82 The corporate philosopher with Roger Steare The essential fusion of love, logic and law
84 Tomorrow’s director Vivan Shridharani on the power of pivot
68 No way out Owner dependence overcome. Find out
72 Risky business Leaders must grow world they have never
be how wise known
Viewpoints
Our guest writers this summer
D-J A Bennett
A respected carpentry and joinery professional, D-J A is known for his practical approach, attention to detail and ability to get things done. Away from work, he is kept equally busy by a young family, where carefully thought-out plans can be dismantled much faster that any piece of furniture. Thankfully, he takes both in his stride.
Perspective p52
Rebecca Burn-Callander
Bex Burn-Callander is a business and technology journalist who has been plying her trade for more than 20 years, interviewing everyone from Sir Richard Branson and Lord Sugar to cricketing great Stuart Broad – and King Charles. The former enterprise editor of the Daily Telegraph is now freelance, and to keep food on the table dabbles in podcasting and events too. In her spare time she wrangles two ankle-biters, runs (badly) and writes children’s fiction.
Spotlight p16
MaryLou Costa
Rather than panic about being replaced by AI, MaryLou Costa has made it her mission to write as much as possible about its impact on work, for titles such as the BBC, the Daily Telegraph and the i Paper She embraces the technology where relevant – spending hours transcribing interviews seems highly archaic now. Outside of writing about AI, you’ll mostly find her thinking about her next holiday, having just returned from a Scandinavian spring break with her family. Where to next? That may well be a question for AI.
Perspective p58
Roger Dennis
Roger Dennis is a consultant with over two decades of experience around the globe, advising boards and chief executives on the connections between foresight and strategy. He is the founder of Dennis & Partners, a consultancy focused on thinking about long-term risks and opportunities. Dennis’s articles have been published in Scientific American, the Stanford Design School magazine, and Knowledge at Wharton Based in New Zealand, his typical online day might start in America, visit Asia for lunch, and finish somewhere in Europe.
Outlook p72
EDITORIAL Editor Ben Walker Creative director Kate Harkus Policy editor Patrick Woodman Chief subeditor Luisa Cheshire Subeditor Camilla Cary-Elwes Publisher Martin Liu IOD EDITORIAL BOARD Director general Jonathan Geldart Chief economist Anna Leach Head of media, campaigns and public affairs Hugo Legh Head of marketing Rebecca Watkinns COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNITIES For advertising and sponsorship requests, please contact Rebecca Watkinns at rebecca.watkinns@iod.com
Material may not be reproduced without permission of the publisher.
Katie Jacobs
Katie Jacobs has been writing about business, management and HR for more than 15 years, with no intention of stopping. A former editor of two business magazines, Jacobs now spends her time writing research and thought leadership and facilitating events, as well as contributing to numerous publications, such as this one. Spare time is hard to come by, but she can often be found lifting heavy things in the gym.
Spotlight p24
Jeremy Kourdi
Jeremy Kourdi is an author of 30 books, educator, coach and entrepreneur who helps leaders navigate and shape the future. He believes the best way to predict the future is to create it – mainly because waiting to see what happens feels unnecessarily risky. His career includes senior roles at the Economist, Duke Corporate Education and the Chartered Management Institute. Family spread across three continents means global perspective, occasional jet lag – and usually a holiday to look forward to.
Spotlight p28
Matt Packer
Matt Packer is an arts and humanities hippie who two decades ago tripped and fell into business journalism and, much to his relief, swam rather than sank. Since then, he has written extensively about a dizzying array of topics ranging from leadership and finance to the legal sector. In the latter field, he has honed a specialist skill in matters related to intellectual property – niche to some, but increasingly relevant at a time of tension between rights-holders and AI.
Perspective p48
Stefan Stern
Stefan Stern has not yet been invited to become the new chair of BP – but he would consider the offer seriously should the opportunity arise. In the meantime, he will continue to write about leadership and management as he has done over the past three and a half decades. His latest book Fair or Foul: The Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition is now available in an audio version. At last, a reliable cure for insomnia!
Spotlight p20
DISCLAIMER While we take care to ensure that editorial is accurate, independent, objective and relevant for readers, Director accepts no liability for reader dissatisfaction rising from the content of the magazine, podcast, blogs or any associated editorial material. The opinions expressed or advice given are the personal views of individual contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of Director the Institute of Directors or LID Business Media Ltd. Director is editorially independent. Display advertisers have no input in editorial content or tone. Where sponsored articles are featured, they will be clearly labelled as such. Director magazine is printed on FSC-approved paper from responsible sources. Director takes every effort to credit photographers, but we cannot guarantee every published use of an image will have the contributor’s name. If you believe we have omitted a credit for your image, please email the editor Ben Walker on ben.walker@lidbusinessmedia.com. Additional images throughout: Shutterstock; Getty; Unsplash. Additional illustration: Oscar Duarte
Your company needs you
Leadership is difficult. Be yourself
Just about managing with Stefan Stern
A cynical Frenchman possibly put it best. “Eh! Je suis leur chef, il fallait bien les suivre.” (“Well, I am their leader, I really ought to follow them.”) The supposed speaker of these words was Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, a 19th-century lawyer and politician, who was active in Paris in the revolutionary years of 1848-49. He was exiled to London for the following two decades when things did not work out so well for him.
Maybe it is reassuring to turn to history when our future seems so unpredictable. No-one –certainly not columnists with early production deadlines – can be confident about what might happen next. At the time of writing, Sir Keir Starmer is still Prime Minister and Donald Trump is, well, still Donald Trump. But by the time you get to read this, at least one of these two statements may no longer be accurate. That’s the way it is for leaders these days.
Newsflash: leadership is hard! If a stubbornly flat economy, geopolitical chaos, renewed inflationary pressures and technological disruption were not enough for you, then there is the small matter of the staff – if you can find them – who may no longer be the deferential and accommodating colleagues of sainted memory. Nobody should go into a leadership role expecting an easy ride. The responsibility of securing the future of a business or organisation weighs heavy. People’s lives and livelihoods are at stake. The management writer Charles Handy used to say that top pay was called ‘compensation’
partly to acknowledge the fact that the job could be so bloody awful at times.
These pressures can be found across all sectors, private, public and not-for-profit. In the UK, increases in employer National Insurance contributions, a higher national minimum wage and continued anxiety over business rates are making every employer’s life harder.
This all serves to sap a leader’s energy, which –even for the most resilient – is a limited resource. In her always interesting blog ‘The Art of a Leader’, Rachael Williams, chief executive of charity Streetwise Opera, writes that leaders she speaks to in a range of disciplines are telling a similar story:
Nobody should go into leadership expecting an easy ride
“In each case, the underlying challenge is that the link between energy, time and resource put in seems to have been decoupled from results,” she writes. “Many of us are throwing absolutely everything we have at keeping our organisations or our teams afloat and, in the best-case scenario, just about managing to stand still.” This may all sound familiar to the bosses of struggling for-profit businesses as well.
At times like this, I turn back to a couple of sources of inspiration that can remind us about the essentials of leadership and what we must focus on. Over 30 years ago, Ronald Heifetz published Leadership Without Easy Answers The book developed the thinking that would become known as his ‘adaptive leadership’ theory.
Heifetz – who trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a Harvard professor – distinguishes between technical problems, which can be solved through expertise, experience and knowledge, and adaptive challenges, which can be new or unfamiliar situations for which the existing leadership toolkit is inadequate. Good, adaptive leaders know they must work (and learn) their way through a new problem, drawing on the skills and insights of others, and developing an adaptive approach. There is no shame in admitting that the situation is uncertain. But there is no sense in adopting the same old approaches and techniques in a new or changed environment –what systems-thinker Russ Ackoff called “doing the wrong thing righter”.
Prof Rob Goffee and Prof Gareth Jones asked leaders a slightly different question a few years later: why should anyone be led by you? This was the title of their original Harvard Business Review article, which later became a bestselling book. Their research into followers revealed that leaders must provide four different qualities at work if they want better results. First: building a sense of community. You cannot expect people to show up and perform for an organisation that has no sense of human identity or coherence. Second: authenticity. Leaders need to be themselves, a real person, with strengths and weaknesses, not a false projection of a person who does not really exist. Third: significance. People need to understand why their work matters, and what the point of it all is. And fourth: energy, or excitement. Are you as a leader a source of positive energy? The Goffee/ Jones analysis is easy to remember – the first letters of its four elements spell the word C-A-S-E.
More evidence is emerging about the current crisis of leadership and the consequences this is having for businesses, organisations and countries. A new survey of around 10,000 employees in 25 countries by Hogan Assessments points to a “leadership mismatch” between the types of behaviour leaders display and what their workforce feels it needs. Employees want an
effective relationship with their leaders, not an impersonal, hierarchical standoff. And employees want to see that adaptive repertoire of actions talked about by Heifetz rather than one-trick ponies who overdo one strength at the expense of other necessary skills.
“Be yourself, more, with skill,” is the Goffee/ Jones advice to leaders. Ask for help. Don’t pretend to know it all. The buck may stop with the person in the top job, but we are all in this together. Good leaders recognise this and will adapt to survive – or get out of the way.
Stefan Stern is a business journalist and visiting professor at Bayes Business School
The board
Better company direction demands a practical mindset
T here is no such thing as the ideal board.
Frameworks that propose grand models for company direction tend to collapse on contact with reality. Every business is distinct and ever-changing. Perfection is impossible; permanence, impractical. What is possible is optimising your board to be the best for your business as it is today.
The realpolitik of running a firm renders the search for board perfection a foolish errand. Skills can always be improved. Diversity of thought can forever be enhanced. Interaction can be constantly enriched. What is feasible – and crucial – is finding the right people, at the right time, for your business: those who ask the right questions, identify weaknesses and maximise strengths.
Too few boards meet the highest standards. A regrettable proportion are poor
sum of their parts. They connect and amplify the diverse minds of their members. They help organisations neutralise threats. They drive firms to maximise opportunities. Crucially, they give companies the wherewithal to anticipate change.
Britain has many high-performing boards. Yet excellence remains relatively uncommon. Too few boards meet the highest standards. Many are mediocre. A regrettable proportion are poor. Failing boards ask poor questions – or fail to ask questions at all. Their members neglect to deploy the emotional intelligence necessary to ensure that company policies pass the ‘sni test’: if something smells o , it probably is.
Elaborate theories of the perfect board proliferate. Yet it is practical guidance that is crucial. With a healthy dose of realism and credible frameworks, boards that perform well are achievable – even probable. And that matters. Because the enhancement of corporate governance is a critical challenge for organisations – and for society.
What makes a high-performing board?
E ective steering groups are greater than the
The consequences of this ine ectiveness can be grave: the crises at the Post Office, Carillion and HBOS are salutary lessons of corporate governance that has failed because of three unwelcome Is: impotence, ignorance or indi erence.
The three Cs
To avoid this undesirable trio, boards must seek instead the three Cs: courage, curiosity and communication.
Courage is an undervalued quality in nonexecutive directors (Neds). It is grossly undervalued in chairs. Without it, board members – no matter how erudite or informed – will miss critical opportunities to challenge received wisdom. Those who unthinkingly go with the ow risk the firm being carried away on a wave of bad decisions. Chairs themselves must be more valiant still. They must be able to recognise when the time is ripe for change at the top, and be willing – when necessary – to remove even themselves.
WORDS Jonathan Geldart
blueprint
Curiosity, too, is crucial (see Ben Walker, page 12 and Natalie Evans, Director, Spring 2026.) Neds that lack inquisitiveness do themselves and their firms a disservice. Decision-making is difficult. Without deep insight into the workings of the business, it becomes impossible. By contrast, boards that explore and examine their companies enthusiastically and forensically unearth the evidence that allows them to change them for the better – and to succeed against sometimes significant odds.
Communication is what helps good board members become a great board. Collective intelligence is a function of the ability of board members and their interaction (see Katie Jacobs, page 24). Communication is the gel that binds the board. It allows it to hone its messaging to the firm. It elevates the collective above the individual wisdom of its components.
Boards must command all three Cs. If just one element is missing, non-executives, particularly the chair, will fail to make the necessary inquiries the business demands. Boards rarely comprise every brain and hold every tool that the company needs. What they can and should do is ask the critical questions to identify where they have sufficient competencies – and where they lack them.
The competency question
con ated with raw skills. Emotional intelligence is equally important. For example, a company may have a technically adept CFO – but if that person is unempathetic they may lack the exibility to allow the company to test and trial. Experimentation without expectation of success is vital in a business landscape that is shi ing exponentially in the face of technological and societal change.
Trusted Neds speak the truth to their companies without upsetting the firms’ foundations. They identify gaps in competency and show how to fill them. They are the early warning system that readies companies for change.
False summits
The IoD’s Competency Framework (the brochure for which can be downloaded here via our QR code), asks chairs and Neds to consider the overarching challenge for any board: ‘Do we have the competency?’ Too o en, competencies can be
Anyone who has ever hiked in Britain will be aware of false summit syndrome – the perception that the mountain’s pinnacle is just ahead when there are several hundreds of feet still to climb. Companies reach many false summits as they grow. Their teams scale an ascent, complete one goal, then suddenly – ahead of them – a new trial presents itself. These in ection points o en demand new thinking, di erent competencies, and – consequently – a reshu e of the board itself.
Thus, boards must be prepared to change themselves as the landscape changes. What works today might not work tomorrow. If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got.
The truth about the board blueprint is that there isn’t just one. What does exist is the right approach to building a better board – even if you must rebuild it many times during the life of your company.
Jonathan Geldart is director general of the Institute of Directors
GO DEEPER
The
Director
Competency Framework
How to be curious
Nurture your innate hunger to know
words Ben Walker illustration Elise Vandeplancke
W
hite Star Line’s RMS Titanic left Southampton docks at noon on 10 April 1912.
Two days later, her captain Cdr Edward Smith received his first warning of ice – from French liner SS La Touraine. When the French ship called, Titanic was still several hundred nautical miles east of the area where she would strike an iceberg and sink. In the days between La Touraine’s warning and the disaster, Cdr Smith would receive a further six warnings from other ships en route.
“Titanic received many incoming messages warning of ice,” Robert Mittelstaedt writes in Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? “But there is no mention of her inquiring of others for updates or more information. What if someone was curious enough to ask for more information?”
Disasters at companies can be attributed to the lack of inquiring leaders
In his book, Leading with Questions, Prof Michael Marquardt argues that a curiosity deficit is identifiable in a raft of catastrophes – corporate and humanitarian. “Disasters at companies such as Lehman Brothers, Kodak, Barclays, Blockbuster, Enron, Borders and Arthur Andersen can be attributed to the lack of inquiring leaders,” he writes. “Because people did not ask questions, people lost lives when the Titanic sank,
when Challenger crashed, and when President Kennedy authorised a covert attack on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.”
Baroness (Natalie) Evans chaired the Institute of Directors’ 2025 commission into non-executive directors (Neds). Drawing on evidence that a lack of inquisitiveness led to the Post Office scandal, among other corporate failures, she argues that a well-honed curiosity should be a prerequisite for board members. “As corporate custodians they are allied with the interests of the company,” she wrote in this journal (Director, Spring 2026), “yet they must be critical friends – not unquestioning companions.”
Evans draws a sharp distinction between “boxticking” and persistent, profound curiosity. “It is a shift away from procedural oversight – the paperbased element, the minutes, the reviewing and the compliance duties,” she tells Director “It’s actually getting under the skin of an organisation – asking probing questions and exploring issues more deeply. It’s a shift of mindset. And it’s a constant engagement – rather than dipping in and out.”
The fourth drive
Curiosity is a core trait of what it is to be human. In his book Curious, the author and journalist Ian Leslie notes that curiosity is the ‘fourth drive’ – an impetus beyond the three primeval urges of food, sex and shelter that differentiates Homo sapiens from other primates.
Leslie quotes John Lloyd, creator of panel show QI, a series predicated on the idea that humans can derive interest from almost anything. “There
is nothing more important or more strange than curiosity,” Lloyd told the BBC when pitching the programme. “Pure curiosity is unique to human beings. When animals snuffle in bushes it’s because they’re looking for the three other things. It’s only people, as far as we know, who look up to the stars and wonder what they are.”
Breeds of curiosity
Leslie deconstructs curiosity into three distinct breeds: diversive, epistemic and empathetic. The most basic – and innate – is diversive, described by Leslie as “the itch to explore”. It is present in children as young as two months. By age four, humans have developed sufficiently to have their inquisition piqued by inconsistencies between what they are told and what occurs. “[They] can recognise conflicting pieces of evidence and perceive a mismatch between a prediction and an actual occurrence,” writes Emily Boudreau in a paper for Harvard Business School. “This discrepancy automatically sparks curiosity.”
Diversive curiosity is inevitable in the young, but often unwelcome: it is as likely to prompt children to jump off a swing, play with matches
– or escape their parents’ clutches and race at full tilt through Heathrow’s security (as this reporter’s son did when 18 months old). In adults, it manifests as unbridled fascination with the new: it is the driving force behind infinite scrolling, commitment-phobia and excessive impatience. When curiosity is diversive, we linger insufficiently on one thing to gain any insight about it. It is the flighty “dipping in and out” Evans warns against.
When, instead, we set our intellectual crosshairs on deeper learning, curiosity morphs from visceral instinct to cerebral superpower. When controlled and deliberate, curiosity becomes epistemic The epistemically curious are determined to discover more about a thing, topic – or company. They experiment and join the dots until they become expert.
The final breed is empathetic: curiosity about the wants, and emotions, of others. The adage (probably wrongly) attributed to former US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt that “great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people” always seemed a little pretentious. But, regardless, empathetic curiosity is not a prurient obsession with other people’s business. “[It’s] distinct from gossip – which we can think of as diversive curiosity about the superficial detail of others’ lives,” writes Leslie. “You practise empathetic curiosity when you genuinely try to put yourself in the shoes – and the mind – of the person you are talking to; to see things from their perspective.”
Like plants in a garden, curiosity occurs – and grows – at a rate dependent on the conditions
Where curiosity happens
Like plants in a garden, curiosity occurs – and grows – at a rate dependent on the conditions.
Recall how discrepancies piqued the interest of four-year-olds. Psychologist
Jean Piaget proposed that surprise – the difference between what we thought would happen and what does happen – is a predictor of curiosity. It can be plotted on a bell curve: when divergences between our expectations and reality are tiny, we ignore them – e.g. our annual conference started five minutes late. When they are moderate, they excite our interest – e.g. why did we make double on the conference than we forecast? When they are large, other dynamics – sometimes selfpreservation, fear or powerlessness – can override our curiosity: e.g. the conference was cancelled last-minute due to a fire in the venue.
There are two other bell curves that describe the prime conditions for curiosity. The second curve is that of knowledge The US economist Dr George Loewenstein posits that curiosity operates like hunger: a small amount of information acts
like an amuse-bouche, stimulating the appetite for more. “Consumption of information is rewarding,” write Profs Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Y Hayden in a paper for the University of Rochester. “But, eventually, when enough information is consumed, satiation occurs and information serves to reduce further curiosity.”
The final bell curve centres on confidence In a seminal study by Min Jeong Kang and colleagues, a cohort of students from the California Institute of Technology were asked 40 quiz questions, on topics ranging from classical music to astronomy. When the students expressed either minimal or maximal confidence in their answers, they exhibited low levels of curiosity about the answers. Yet where their confidence was moderate they exhibited high levels of curiosity. “In these circumstances, compulsion to know the answer was so great that they were willing to pay for the information even though curiosity could have been sated for free after the session,” write Kidd and Hayden. The findings indicate that both underconfidence and overconfidence militate against curiosity (see page 28).
The critical question
Benjamin Verrall is a filmmaker and writer whose upcoming book Still Learning posits that curiosity should become a practice – a habit that we must nurture. “Stop and think,” he urges in the book, “when you last asked: ‘why?’”
Verrall argues that the critical question – ‘why?’ – is too rarely asked in business. “It gets trained out of us,” he tells Director “Children – obviously – ask questions. But then through school and, later, through work we become conditioned to believe in certainty.”
He cites three psychological barriers that prevent us from asking the critical question. Closedmindedness – the overconfidence explored by Kang – is one. “All human beings are very protective over that,” he says. “We want to be right. We want to feel like we were never wrong. But, ultimately, the only way you can learn anything is to be okay with being wrong sometimes.”
Verrall’s other two curiosity barriers are born of social pressure: the fear of looking silly; and a desire to fit in – with an authority figure or the status quo.
Yet overriding our social instincts need not be excruciating. Verrall suggests a series of phrases designed to soften the blow – to both parties – of asking ‘why’. “You can approach questioning with respect and curiosity, framing your questions in a way that shows a genuine desire to understand,” he writes. “Try using phrases like ‘I’m curious about…’ or ‘Can you help me understand…?’”
Cultural resistance to enquiry can be overcome, he argues, such that colleagues relish the intellectual challenge. “Maybe because we’re
Curiosity curves
The prime conditions for curiosity
British, people don’t want to feel like they are being attacked with a question,” says Verrall. “That’s the key thing. But most people love answering questions – because most of our thinking happens on our feet.”
Towards curiosity
When this reporter was young, he found the parental chastisement “only bored people get bored” as trite as the naked falsehood that eating the crusts on her bread would cause my cousin’s hair to curl. Yet the former cliché turns out to be true. “Researchers have found that people can consciously adopt and implement curiosityenhancing strategies to heighten their interest in a given task or situation,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Negotiation Journal noted as early as 2009.
The IoD commission on Neds concluded last year. But Evans suggests that enhancing curiosity should be an enduring quest. “It’s something that we do need to be honest about and need to tackle,” she says. “Boards themselves as a collective need to come together and ask, ‘Are we doing a bit too much of the procedural oversight?’ ‘Are we really getting under the skin?’ Are they really going that extra mile to understand the business they are involved in?”
Ben Walker is editor of Director
DIRECTOR DISTILLED
Curiosity crucial to organisational success and safety
Psychological barriers to enquiry can be overcome
Boards should question whether they are sufficiently curious
GO DEEPER Curious (Quercus) is out now
NEDs reimagined
A post-Higgs review of the role and contribution of non-executive directors
Sources: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity by Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Y Hayden. The Wick in the Candle of Learning by Kang et al.
The groupthink
Similarity is a ticket to failure
WORDS Rebecca Burn-Callander
“ Groupthink is the bi est risk we face today. If you look at almost every crisis of the last 20 years, at the root, there was groupthink.” So says Sara Weller, one of the most experienced board directors in the UK. A board director at BT and chair of the Money and Pensions Service (Maps), Weller has previously sat on the boards of Sainsbury’s, Virgin Money, Lloyds Bank and United Utilities, to name a few. And, over the years, she has learned a thing or two about groupthink.
Coined by American social psychologist Irving Janis in his 1971 book, Victims of Groupthink, the term explains a phenomenon that can occur when “decision-making bodies agree for the sake of agreeing to abandon their critical judgement”. It is the sacrifice of debate for the sake of harmony.
“Take the financial crisis: that only happened because the people in charge convinced themselves it was impossible,” Weller, who was awarded a CBE in 2015 for public service, tells Director. “The prevailing consensus was that markets could never become illiquid. No one asked: but what if they did?”
The cause
What could persuade a group of intelligent people to abandon their acute powers of reasoning and
become nodding dogs? The answer is complex. According to Claire Trachet, founder of advisory firm Trachet, which helps fast-growing companies make board appointments, much of it comes down to human nature and power dynamics.
“Sometimes, one person has a lot of leverage on the board,” Trachet says. “Perhaps they are the superstar investor and the only person who can help finance the company further. No one wants to rock the boat. That creates groupthink.” She has also witnessed other catalysts for groupthink, such as when a company is outperforming rivals. “So, the board thinks, ‘we must be doing something right,’” she says.
“I’ve been in rooms where everyone initially nods in agreement around the table,” says Jessica Espinoza, who heads up 2X Global, the finance industry’s membership body for gender equality. “That can feel efficient in the moment, but sometimes it’s a signal that the same assumptions are going unchallenged.”
Weller says that groupthink isn’t a conscious choice; it’s more insidious. “I loved my leadership team when I worked at Argos 20 years ago,” she says. “We worked really well together. But, looking back, that was partly because we weren’t a very diverse team. There were no contrarian views.
What persuades intelligent people to abandon reason and become nodding dogs?
trap
No representation from minorities. That could have helped us to see many opportunities that just weren’t on our radar.”
The antidote
The prevailing wisdom is that building a diverse board can help prevent groupthink. This was borne out by a review of more than 200 studies, published in 2025, which found that “board diversity positively in uences corporate financial performance in a majority of the research”. A closer look at some of these individual studies shows the detail: a Cloverpop analysis of 600 business decisions made by 200 di erent teams found that more diverse teams made better decisions up to 87% of the time. Harvard Business Review research shows cognitively diverse teams solve complex problems faster.
The e ectiveness of diverse voices depends on the willingness of the board to learn
A recent study published in the European Journal of Finance found that “banks with greater boardroom gender diversity and transparency in its disclosure are associated with a higher likelihood of detection of misconduct and larger sanctions”. This re ects Weller’s point about the financial crisis – it’s the people asking the le field questions that discover risk and wrongdoing.
“On boards where there is real diversity and not just one token voice, the conversation is usually more rigorous,” explains Espinoza. “Assumptions are challenged more quickly, risks are examined more carefully, and decisions tend to be more balanced. In contrast, when everyone around the table shares similar backgrounds and
experiences, discussions can move very quickly – but sometimes too quickly, and in the wrong direction.”
Weller, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009, acknowledges the power of her unique perspective at BT. “I helped BT draw on the experience of people with disabilities, which they used to redesign their Home Hub with both lights and sound to warn of a problem,” she recalls. “If you’re blind you can’t see the light, and if you’re deaf you can’t hear the noise.”
The balance
Not all diversity is created equal. “It’s not just about external di erence,” says Dr Shefaly Yogendra, a non-executive director on FTSE 250, university and professional services boards, as well as an experienced chair of ESG, remuneration, nomination, and audit and risk committees. “You need to go deeper and look at how they have trained, where they have lived, their formative experiences. You need to find voices that enhance the quality of the debate.”
Yogendra embodies multiple kinds of diversity: she is a woman, of Indian origin, trained as an engineer, she has built an AI company, achieved a PhD in decision-making, she has worked in corporate venturing in the technolo and biotech sectors. “I have trained in multiple disciplines, lived in many countries and wide range of interests,” she says. “Plus, my eternal and endless curiosity makes me a good director.”
Yogendra interviewed 100 business leaders non-executives about how to run e ective for her book Uncharted Spaces: Reset the agenda. Reimagine the boardroom “The key is to recognise the di erences around the table and to value from that,” she says.
she and have board and boards derive person has being
Too o en, according to Weller, boards will tick the diversity box by appointing a woman or a of colour. “But they choose a woman who been to the same university as them, held the same sort of roles,” she says. “You can be diverse on the surface without being diverse at all.”
The board also must actually listen to the diverse voices it appoints. “The e ectiveness of diverse voices depends on the willingness of the board to learn,” says Weller. “Otherwise you end up in a world where someone says, ‘Yes, that’s very interesting, but let’s do it the way we have always done it.’”
The limitations
Appointing a diverse board doesn’t mean change will happen instantly, even when its members speak up. Board members are not operators: they can in uence but not execute. This distinction is important.
“I remember when I was on the board of Lloyds, and a year had passed,” recalls Weller. “I sat down with the chair of the risk committee, who was a ‘big beast’ on the board, and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. Nothing I say is going in. Nobody is listening.’ He told me, ‘You’re the slow drip that wears away the stone. Change isn’t going to happen overnight – but keep going.’”
The UK ranks among the top countries in Europe for boardroom diversity. The Parker Review, published in March, revealed that 98% of FTSE 100 companies now have at least one ethnic minority director on their board, a record number – and a big increase from 52% in 2019.
Last year’s FTSE Women Leaders Review report showed that women now occupy 43% of roles on company boards in the FTSE 350, a new record. Yet critics point to the so-called ‘Golden Skirts’ syndrome, the phenomenon whereby the same women – o en from a uent backgrounds, Oxbridge educated and white – hold multiple nonexecutive positions.
The chair
Being the person that brings an alternative view is “no fun”, admits Weller. “I have been appointed as the ‘diverse voice’ many times in my career. When you’re the one asking questions that everyone presumes they have the answers to, people look at you like you’re stupid.”
She cites her time serving on the board of United Utilities. “I asked, ‘What’s the risk of a dam breaking and ooding a village?’ Everyone looked at me,” she recalls. “They told me, ‘There’s no way that would ever happen.’ My point was: assume that it did, what would we do? Interestingly, the management there were great, they listened and were open to challenge. But, if you’re all the same kind of people, with similar backgrounds and experience, you must constantly watch you don’t end up with blind spots.”
One person has the power to amplify and support diverse voices around the boardroom table: the chair. “This is perhaps the most important job they have,” says Weller. “To get a range of voices to the table and encourage everyone to respect diversity of thought. That’s the only way these voices can help provide a textured solution to complex problems.”
A great chairperson does more than encourage everyone to speak up, they enforce the culture of the board, including the need to debate with respect. “As chair, it’s your job to turn points of di erence into constructive solutions,” says Weller. “You must not allow conversations to descend into con ict.”
Non-executives – appointed as the contrarians on the board – don’t have to rely solely on the chair for support, says Yogendra. Fostering ‘informal’ relationships with fellow board members outside
of board meetings human, understanding and what has more likely
How to diversify
“Too o en, same informal or former CEOs,” “It’s understandable people tend those they already – but it naturally the pipeline.”
Asking for a diverse spread of nominations from the outset is a useful way to help ensure a level playing field, such as equal numbers women, recommends important to revisit “For instance, insisting on previous CEO experience can unintentionally exclude many highly qualified women who have led major divisions, investment portfolios or global programmes.”
Yogendra interviewed Barnados chair Mark Wood to find out how he encouraged diversity of thought on the board. He told her that during the board recruitment process he would ask the nominations committee to ask, “Why not?” for candidates that they planned to reject. “He found that, through this exercise, people were forced to challenge their biases and eventually make more robust decisions,” Yogendra recounts.
Beware appointing a diverse voice who is expected to speak for all women, or all of a certain race, however. “There are 1.4 billion Indians in the world,” says Yogendra. “I can’t speak for all of them!”
The UK has come a long way in boardroom diversity. Some of these forward-thinking organisations will achieve improved financial performance. Many will find their ability to adapt to new challenges and trends enhanced. Others will avoid expensive or painful missteps. All because someone in a boardroom dared to ask a ‘stupid’ question. And their peers listened.
Rebecca Burn-Callander is a business journalist and former enterprise editor of the Daily Telegraph
DIRECTOR DISTILLED
Diverse boards proven to perform better
Board gender diversity, disclosure and unethical banking conduct outdated adds.
Diversity of thought not guaranteed by demographic diversity
Boardroom search criteria can militate against diversity
GO DEEPER
The impact of board diversity on corporate performance
Aye, robot
Your new colleagues might be more firmware than flesh
WORDS Stefan Stern ILLUSTRATION Daniele Simonelli
The black rhino. The Yangtze finless porpoise. The Sumatran orangutan. Those are some of the planet’s most endangered species, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Perhaps, before long, we might have to add the human board director to the list as well.
Okay, that might be a bit over the top. But anyone who read ‘Can AI boards outperform human ones?’ on Harvard Business Review’s website could be forgiven for wondering about the professional life expectancy of the average board member.
As I floated in my previous column (Director, Spring 2026), the article revealed the findings of a fascinating experiment that had been carried out on both sides of the Atlantic. Academics at the Corporate Governance Centre at Insead in France and the Mack Institute for Innovation
Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, led the research into the performance of parallel boards set up to analyse and debate the same business issue. Six boards were made up of real-life human executives, and one more board was composed of AI chatbots. Directors – analogue and digital – were given the same agendas. A two-hour meeting was held, with a transcript taken. After the meetings, the human boards completed a self-assessment exercise. But the work and outputs of all the boards, human and AI alike, were also assessed by independent (human) experts and by AI assessors too. Their performance was measured under eight headings: decision quality; ‘implementability’; collective learning; director participation; use of facts; fair and inclusive process; depth of exploration; and chair performance.
Six boards were made up of real-life human executives, and one more board was composed of AI chatbots
The outperforming bots
The results surprised many. The AI board consistently outperformed the human ones in almost every way.
Readers of my column will recall that, on ‘decision quality’, for example, both sets of assessors said that humans “hesitated and circled around options without landing on a clear strategy”.
Dive a little deeper, and the criticism kept coming: the humans’ discussions were described as “difficult to follow” and “not always wellarticulated”. The AI board, by contrast, “reached clear, actionable resolutions”. One assessor said the bot board “framed decisions with explicit contingencies and next steps”.
On “decision implementability”, the expert assessors said that the human boards “rarely translated strategy into concrete targets” and offered “not enough debate based on facts”. But the bot board “aligned its direction with available resources”, and “translated headline choices into concrete actions”. These decisions were “practical, realistic and well-aligned with constraints”.
On facts and data, humans displayed “limited engagement with the pre-read” and “missed opportunities to ground arguments in data”. But AI boards “actively cited figures from the documents”, “reconciled discrepancies in real time”, and “wove quantitative evidence into their reasoning”.
You get the point. Poor, distracted, vain humans simply did not measure up when compared with the cool, rational, unemotional and data-driven discussion and decision-making of the robots.
In search of greater detail (and, frankly, a bit of human sympathy), Director spoke to the two lead academics on this project, Insead’s Stanislav Shekshnia and Wharton’s Valery Yakubovich. Is the game up for us humans? What will boards of the future look like?
The good news is that both lead researchers take a measured and pragmatic view of how human boards can best deploy, and work with, the powerful new technology.
The results surprised many. The AI board consistently outperformed the human ones
Digital colleagues
Shekshnia suggested there are four ways in which AI could actually help the human board to do better. The first of these has to do with the classic information gap between the board and management – often referred to as ‘information asymmetry’. Directors receive sometimes unwieldy packs of information prior to board meetings, which they may or may not have the time (or inclination) to study properly. But AI can read, digest and summarise such information very effectively, and present it in a more readable form.
Another way AI can help is as a ‘copilot’, a tool to enable more vigorous alternative scenario planning. What if management is proposing only one alternative option? Could AI help you to calculate a few more? Shekshnia says, “For years, board members have been saying, ‘Okay, we need to use scenario planning, but we don’t have the time or the capability to do this…’ And now AI is there to help them.”
A third and potentially more intrusive option is to use AI as a kind of coach to the board discussion, an observer and commentator which can – when invited – intervene to let you know where the discussion is going, and potentially where it is going wrong. The chair could be supported by an AI voice which might say, for example, colleague X or Y has spoken for too long,
and colleague Z has not had a chance to speak at all. Or the copilot might say: you have all wandered off from the question in hand. Or: colleague A made a perceptive comment a few minutes ago and it got lost… and so on.
Perhaps the most ambitious and elaborate option is to set up an AI agent as a (quasi) board member and participant itself. It can have a human voice. It can ask to intervene at any time.
Exponential mistakes
At Wharton, Yakubovich reminds us that, while the rapid technological leaps made by AI are impressive, it still has flaws of which we must be aware. “For now, I don’t see when we’ll ever be sure that AI is going to act without major or obvious mistakes,” he says. Yes, there are potentially huge productivity gains to be made. “But as soon as one mistake is made, it escalates, also exponentially. So where to put people in the loop so they catch that?”
This is perhaps the good news for board members, and even for managers at all levels. “This is where a lot of work – future work – will emerge for humans,” Yakubovich adds. “To be in the right places, at the right time, in the loop… everyone becomes a manager, only you either manage agents, or you manage people and agents.”
At board level, new chairing and interpersonal (and inter-AI) skills will be needed, he says: “The board meeting will change, and in the future the meeting may have a mixture of inputs, perhaps with agents speaking up at certain moments… We are now revising all our workflows based on these new AI capabilities. We should do the same with boards.”
For a reality check on the future of boards and AI, it was time to hear from Megan Pantelides, senior director at consultancy Board Intelligence (see Katie Jacobs, page 24). She warns that a lot of boards – especially at larger companies – are not ready to commit fully to AI in the boardroom, in part because of controls around information security risk. “It’s the risk of people not using AI safely,” she says. “I think organisations are definitely moving at very different speeds when it comes to this.”
One concern has to do with the ‘discoverability’ of board-level discussions, she adds. If AI technology is recording every utterance made in the boardroom, this could have consequences if investors, or others, were to pursue legal action against directors. There is a reason why wise company secretaries do not necessarily record every comment in the minutes. There needs to be a practical benefit to introducing AI. “We’ve been challenging ourselves to think very carefully about what problem you’re trying to solve with AI, and making sure that we don’t just default to the ‘make it more efficient’
If we are staring at screens or listening to AIs, we will not be listening to each other
answer,” Pantelides says, “because that is not necessarily going to help boards to operate more effectively... it does not make the board discussion more impactful.”
Legally, human directors are still in the driving seat. “They are still the ones responsible for exercising independent judgement,” Pantelides says. So the questions boards must ask themselves are: what are the decisions that need to remain human-led, and which are the ones that can be delegated to AI? What kind of transparency do we need to have around the role AI is playing in these decisions and in these processes?
The human edge
There is life in human beings yet. We need the humility to recognise the sheer processing power of the new technology. But the best technologists also recognise the limits (and potential hazards) of their inventions.
This was perhaps one of the less well-publicised elements in the original Wharton/Insead research. The board assessors noticed that the AI had struggled with the “informal, interpersonal and cultural aspects of governance”. The bots “excelled in structure and detail” but “fell short in the relational dynamics that shape human interaction”.
If we are all staring at screens, or listening to the computer’s voice, we will be neither looking at nor listening to each other. The duties of a director include turning up and being fully present as a human, drawing on experience and judgement.
Just as the pocket calculator helped us to do our sums quicker, AI will enhance and turbocharge decision-making. But, when it comes to decisions, it is the board who will have to sign on the dotted line, with a real, human signature.
Stefan Stern is a business journalist
DIRECTOR DISTILLED
AI directors clear and diligent Bots useful for scenario planning Human judgement still critical
Hive minds
Collective intelligence is worth the work
WORDS Katie Jacobs
W e all know how this story ends. In 1975, an engineer at Kodak invented the digital camera. When he demonstrated it to his management team, they dismissed it, downplaying the innovation to protect the company’s hugely lucrative photographic film revenues. Over the next three decades, engineers continued to develop digital photography technolo , but successive boards and leadership teams refused to commit to embracing it as a strate By the time Kodak seriously started moving into digital, it was too late. In 2012, the firm filed for bankruptcy.
Kodak’s failure to innovate isn’t a story of individual stupidity or culpability – the firm was full of brilliant people. Rather, it’s a fable of collective institutional blindness: a board acting as less than the sum of its parts. And it is not an isolated example of a board failing to live up to its promise.
“Until you go into a boardroom, you assume it’s a well-oiled machine of the most powerful and experienced people wrestling with thorny issues
through high-quality debate and discussion, but the reality is very di erent,” says Megan Pantelides, senior director at Board Intelligence. The many examples of “boards failing in their duties, scandals and bust-ups” (Carillion, the Post Office and BHS are just a few examples) hammer the point home.
And while recruitment is important, it is only half the battle. The bi er challenge comes when people are already seated around the table, creating and harnessing the collective intelligence – the hive mind – that enables the board to operate as far more than the sum of its parts.
“Collective intelligence is when you pool the intellectual capital of a group of people, tapping into each individual’s unique experience, perspectives and knowledge to deliver better outcomes,” explains Pantelides. “It’s about giving individuals a platform to add value through their expertise and viewpoints, but it’s also about the group, coming to the right conclusion, making the smart decision and doing it quickly. It’s two plus two equals five.”
Until you go into a boardroom, you assume it’s a well-oiled machine. The reality is di erent
But building collective intelligence is easier said than done, with directors facing a series of challenges, many of them structural. First, there’s the simple yet inescapable fact that boards meet infrequently. This, says Dr Philip Stiles, associate professor of corporate governance at Cambridge Judge Business School, stands in the way of boards learning to come together and perform as a team. “Teams are groups,” he points out. “And groups need time to develop.” He adds that the
natural split between executive and non-executive directors can also stymie the development of collective intelligence.
The same is true of time constraints in the meetings themselves, as well as in how agendas are designed, says Pantelides. “The first thing on the agenda is approving the minutes from the last meeting, then listening to a series of performance updates… Time for strategic discussion is o en curtailed, and the mental ener in the room has dissipated by that point.” This is a major miss given that collective intelligence brings the most value when it is used to shape strate rather than monitor performance.
Away from the structures of the board, there’s the challenge of e ectively managing the personalities of those involved. That must start with selection, which should be viewed through the lens of creating the ideal conditions for collective intelligence to ourish. Randall Peterson is professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School and an expert in board dynamics. In his time observing boardroom behaviour, he sees one theory regularly proven wrong: “Assuming that getting the ten smartest people together in a room will give you a good outcome.”
One reason for this, he explains, is the tendency to treat the board as a group of individuals rather than a collective. “Boards can end up being less than the sum of their parts if you’ve got a group of people who are super-smart, but heavily overlapped in what they can do,” Prof Peterson says. “No matter how good they are, the whole board will never be great.” That makes doing
The five elements
The
Depressivity
Emotional lability
Shamefulness
Excitement seeking
Attention seeking
Magical thinking
Eccentricity
a skills audit before designing the ideal candidate profile essential. As Peterson puts it: “You’re better o having someone who is ‘good’ in the space you need than a superstar in the space you don’t.”
‘Agreeableness’ is one of the ‘big five’ personality traits identified in modern psycholo (see graphic). From a personality perspective, Peterson’s research has found that the more ‘agreeableness’ in the room, the more e ectively the board functions. “You want people who are inclined to collaborate,” he explains. “You can get away with not collaborating in management, but not on a board.” Pantelides adds that hubris (“when people are so elevated – and have an in ated sense of the quality of their judgement and decisionmaking – that others don’t feel they can challenge them”) can destroy collective intelligence.
Managing those dynamics falls squarely on the chair, who must also be aware that certain personality traits tend to clash, potentially derailing board meetings. For example, says Peterson, those with high openness to experience can clash with those with lower openness. Highopenness types – those who love ideas – and more data-orientated low-openness board members o en frustrate each other.
When it comes to understanding the di erent personality dynamics at play in the boardroom, Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, organisational psychologist and chief science officer at executive search firm Russell Reynolds, advocates board members undergoing personality profiling assessments. Such tools help develop not only self-awareness at an individual level, but also give
Fearlessness
Shamelessness
Source: Simple Psycholo
Social withdrawal
Detached coldness
Inflexible
Close-minded
Submissiveness
Selflessness
Gullability
Perfectionism
Workaholism
Deceitfulness
Manipulativeness
Callousness
Distractibility
Irresponsibility
Rashness
Managing board
dynamics falls squarely on the chair, who must be aware that certain personality traits clash
a clearer picture of how the group can function as a team.
“You could see that the board over-indexes on disruption, missing the bread-and-butter aspects of performance, or that it over-indexes on attention to detail, so ends up being more tactical than strategic,” he says. Such tools can provide a psychological map of the board, which should be used to both fill vacancies and work together more e ectively, as well as giving insight into what personality ‘derailers’ could throw the board o course.
The aim, Dr Chamorro-Premuzic believes, is to have a board rich in cognitive diversity, meaning that “whatever is discussed, you have di erent points of view present and can make better decisions, while being aware of blind spots and biases”. But getting a cognitively diverse group to function e ectively as a team, unleashing collective intelligence, is not always easy.
Harnessing that cognitive diversity, making sure con ict is constructive rather than destructive, is ultimately the chair’s job, who must create the space and psychological safety for people to share dissenting views. As Stiles puts it: “Collective consciousness lives or dies by the chair’s role.” “The chair has to be like a symphony conductor,” says Chamorro-Premuzic – something that requires as much art and emotional intelligence as science.
The o en-unspoken hierarchies that exist in most groups mean that status matters even in a room of powerful people. To encourage people to speak up, Peterson encourages directors to actively give ideas a lifeline. “People care about their status, how they are seen by others and don’t want to say anything silly,” he says. “The willingness to say, ‘I’m not sure but it’s interesting,’ sounds simple but it’s a huge thing for boards.”
In a similar vein, Pantelides advocates carefully thinking about how boardroom discussions are shaped, including sharing notes on the board pack in advance. “The best boards think carefully about how to use their time, and about how they challenge their biases and assumptions, and get everyone in the room to share their voice,” she says.
“There’s a lot of intentionality around how you get the board to work.”
Advances in technolo mean directors can dive into the data: transcription tools can give insight into how much each person spoke, or how decisions were reached, for example. Feedback from board-e ectiveness reviews provides further datapoints.
Stiles says boards should consider taking time – in addition to regular meetings – to scenarioplan or undergo crisis-simulation exercises. Doing so creates opportunities to challenge assumptions by throwing boards into a di erent context. It also helps deepen relationships.
While aiming for collective intelligence, boards must be cognisant of one key risk: dri ing into groupthink (see Rebecca Burn-Callander, page 16). This can translate into collective stupidity, as Kodak’s board found to its cost. The key is finding a sweet spot on the continuum that runs from constructive dissent to collective intelligence to groupthink. “You need a bit of tension, which will only come if people are free to speak up – but if you cannot move, there is no harmony,” says Chamorro-Premuzic.
Ultimately, the board needs to be thought of like any team, through the lens of team distribution, performance and e ectiveness. That takes work, but it’s worth it.
As Pantelides says: “If you pool your collective intelligence e ectively, the outcome should be a more agile, informed, value-adding board.” And, in a troubled, complex world, who wouldn’t want that?
Katie Jacobs is a business journalist and former editor of HR magazine
isn’t competence
Experience can be your own worst enemy
words Jeremy Kourdi & Amanda Knight illustration Luisa Jung
M ajor acquisitions fail. Technology investments misfire. Cultural risks go unnoticed until they erupt. Boardrooms are full of intelligent, experienced people. Yet organisations still make poor strategic decisions. This is rarely because directors lack intelligence or experience. In fact, the opposite is often true.
Experience is an asset. It enhances pattern recognition, intuition and confidence. Yet in certain situations, it can also be deceptive. It may cause leaders to cling to outdated assumptions, overestimate their understanding, and make it more difficult to recognise what has changed.
Amid technological acceleration, shifting workforce expectations and geopolitical uncertainty, this tension matters more than ever. Directors must rely on their experience. But they must also be willing to question it.
Boards often focus on the conclusions themselves rather than the confidence – understanding dynamic behind them. Yet decision quality
depends heavily on this interaction. High confidence combined with limited understanding poses the greatest risk. Low confidence paired with deep expertise may lead to valuable insights being overlooked.
The confidence trap
One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that confidence and competence frequently present in the absence of the other. The Dunning–Kruger effect – first described by psychologists Dr David Dunning and Dr Justin Kruger – shows that individuals with limited understanding of a topic often overestimate their ability. At the same time, highly capable individuals sometimes underestimate their expertise. In other words, those who are most certain they are right are not always those with the strongest understanding.
This phenomenon is not limited to inexperienced employees. It appears at every level of leadership, including the board.
Those who are most certain they are right are not always those with the strongest understanding
Research into leadership development frequently finds that individuals can be highly confident in their judgement while misunderstanding key issues. Scenariobased assessments of leadership capability – such as those we provide at Cognisco – show that misunderstanding combined with high confidence represents one of the highest risk profiles for decision-making In board settings, the consequences can be grave.
Directors may overestimate their understanding of issues such as artificial intelligence (AI), cyber risk, workforce transformation or sustainability. Discussion then becomes anchored around confident assertions rather than careful exploration. Confidence can masquerade as competence.
such conditions, experience alone may fail to provide reliable guidance. Patterns from the past may not fit the present. As Mark Twain famously observed, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Nokia and the ‘burning platform’
A sobering example of overconfidence comes from Nokia. It dominated the global mobile phone market in the early 2000s. Yet, when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 and Android expanded rapidly, Nokia underestimated how quickly the market was shifting from hardware devices to software ecosystems. By 2010, its chief executive Stephen Elop warned that Nokia had become too confident in the strengths
Experience can tether thinking to outdated assumptions just when markets are heading in new directions
Experience as a false friend
Most directors reach board level because of successful careers. Their experience is extensive. Their instincts have served them well. But the conditions that shaped those instincts are changing rapidly.
Consider the example of AI, which is transforming how organisations operate. Some 72% of organisations are increasing investment in the technology. Yet only one in five leaders say they feel equipped to lead effectively in a digital-first environment. In practice, this often means board discussions are dominated by confident language about transformation, automation or productivity gains, while the underlying understanding of the technology’s risks and limits remains uneven and insufficient.
This gap between confidence and understanding reflects the dynamic described by the Dunning–Kruger effect. And in the boardroom, it can shape decisions worth millions. The result is a business landscape that is more volatile, ambiguous and interconnected than ever before. In
that had once made it successful. In 2011, Elop issued an infamous internal memo stating the company was standing on a ‘burning platform’ as competitors redesigned the industry.
Within a few years, Nokia’s dominance in mobile telephony had collapsed. For directors, the lesson is obvious. Experience can tether thinking to outdated assumptions just when markets are heading in new directions.
The truth about decisions
Boardroom decision-making is rarely as rational as textbooks suggest. In reality, decisions are shaped by time pressure, incomplete information and human psychology. Several common dynamics appear repeatedly:
Authority bias – deferring to the most senior or confident voice Confirmation bias – favouring information that supports existing views Fluency bias – equating persuasive communication with strong insight Groupthink – prioritising harmony over challenge (see Rebecca Burn-Callander, page 16)
These behaviours are normal human tendencies. The risk emerges when they combine with overconfidence. Directors might believe they understand an issue because they have heard convincing explanations, or because it resembles challenges they have encountered before. However, the underlying conditions may have changed considerably. The business world is in flux. Boards must be especially careful not to mistake familiarity for understanding.
Judgement in a changing world
The context in which leaders operate has fundamentally shifted. Technology, data and connectivity are transforming how organisations compete. Employees and customers increasingly expect personalised experiences and responsible behaviour from organisations. Global supply chains, political uncertainty and environmental pressures create new layers of complexity.
Leadership scholars often describe this environment using acronyms such as Vuca (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) or Bani (brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible). Regardless of terminology, the message is clear: the world is changing faster than experience alone can reliably explain.
Research in decision-making by Gary Klein and Richard Kahneman has explored the tension between expertise and judgement. They found that experienced decision-makers often rely on pattern recognition derived from prior experience. This can enable quick and effective judgements. But it may also cause cognitive lock-in when environments change and familiar patterns no longer apply.
Successful leaders, therefore, rely less on certainty and more on curiosity (see Ben Walker, page 12). They ask questions. They seek diverse perspectives. They remain alert to weak signals of change. The goal of effective leadership is not lower confidence, but better calibrated confidence. Calibrated leaders align their level of certainty with the quality of available evidence. When evidence is strong, confidence can be high. When uncertainty is significant, confidence should remain provisional. In such environments, judgement matters more than knowledge alone.
Towards better judgement
If confidence can mislead, how should directors respond? The first step is recognising that judgement is not simply a product of experience. It is a skill that can be developed. Effective board directors increasingly focus on several disciplines.
1 Distinguish confidence from understanding
The most effective boards examine how confident leaders are in their conclusions and how strong the underlying evidence is. When confidence greatly exceeds understanding, further exploration is required.
2
Distinguish facts, assumptions and interpretations
Boards often blur these categories. Explicitly separating them improves clarity and reduces misplaced certainty.
Before a major decision, ask directors to record their views independently. This reduces the influence of dominant voices and groupthink.
5
Test decisions through scenarios
Scenario-based approaches help boards examine how they might respond to complex situations. These exercises reveal how leaders think and prioritise in uncertain conditions.
6
Appoint a rotating ‘devil’s advocate’
One director is asked to challenge assumptions in each major discussion. Making this a formal role normalises constructive challenge.
7
Measure confidence as well as conclusions
When reviewing proposals, ask directors not only what they think, but how confident they are. Large gaps between confidence levels often reveal uncertainty that deserves exploration.
8 Bring external perspectives into the room
Many boards are composed of leaders with similar backgrounds. Inviting domain experts, or younger executives, into strategic discussions can challenge embedded assumptions.
9 Encourage intellectual humility and curiosity
The most effective boards normalise phrases such as:
“I may be wrong, but…”
“What are we missing?”
“Who sees this differently?”
The most effective directors remain learners. They explore emerging trends, engage with new ideas, and seek new perspectives.
10 Develop self-awareness
Understanding personal biases is crucial. Directors who recognise the limits of their knowledge are better able to seek insight from others.
Practical questions
Boards seeking to strengthen decision quality should consider asking themselves several simple questions. These questions shift the focus away from defending existing assumptions
to improving collective judgement:
Where might experience be misleading us?
Which issues are we confident about, but have not examined deeply?
Are we encouraging genuine challenge in our board discussions? How well do we understand emerging technologies shaping our industry?
What signals from employees, customers or society might we be overlooking?
The director’s real advantage
Experience remains invaluable. It provides context, perspective and hard-earned wisdom. But in a world of rapid change, experience must be balanced with humility. The most effective directors recognise the limits of their knowledge, invite challenge and adapt their thinking as new information emerges.
Confidence may feel reassuring in the boardroom, but true competence lies in continually questioning whether we are right.
Expert Leader. Amanda Knight is a business psychologist and chief executive of Cognisco
Jeremy Kourdi is an executive coach, educator and chief executive of
Board, to tears
How on earth do we manage?
Under the spotlight with Emma Rowland
The perfect board. A brie, a reblochon, a Comté and some quince jam? Too French. Sixty-four black and white chequered squares? Too regicidal. A buoyant plank and an eager Australian atop a wave? Too Billabong. Alright back to the drawing… Boardrooms hold clout the PM could only ever dream about. The corporation is pretty much the one place you don’t want your boards to be wooden. Take note, Sir Keir. Governance is worth getting right. Because imagine a world where our decision-makers constantly change their minds about important issues. Imagine a world where leaders have little nous for long-term strategy.
The first violinist sits at the very front of the orchestra but is held to tempo by the precise point of the conductor’s baton. With their back to the audience, eyes on the breadth of the ensemble, the conductor shapes the symphony, pulling the strings, commanding the different sections through deep knowledge of the composition in its entirety. Silent but effective communication, which is, you could say, instrumental.
The helmsman stands at the wheel of the ship, maintaining a straight course across the choppy waters. But it’s the maritime navigators who chart the safest route, who plan to avoid icebergs, who
Boardrooms hold clout the PM could only ever dream about. The corporation is the one place you don’t want your boards to be wooden
Imagine a world where executives push through policies that advisers have expressly told them not to. Wait…
How on earth do we manage?
You must be a certain type of person to want to run a country – usually the sort that you don’t really want to be running a bath, let alone a country. The PM stands at the soon-to-bedispatched box and is scrutinised by the green and red benches. They are perhaps less boards of directors and more bored of the direction in which the country is headed. But they hold him to account, nonetheless.
plot the new journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Then the freight companies hoist up the prices, and out-of-pocket exporters curse the loose cannon which crashes around causing chaos.
As it transpires, there’s no right way to direct. But there are plenty of examples of the wrong way. You only have to read the morning papers each day…
The terrible board. Monopoly solely built up of income tax squares? Too much like real life. A landing zone for darts with no bullseye? Bit like the growth strategy. A panel full of splinters? Somewhat like the Labour Party at the moment. Lucky the PM’s father is a toolmaker – if you hadn’t heard – maybe he can offer some advice.
You may have already read Jonathan Geldart’s column on the three Cs of high-performing boards. If you haven’t, definitely take a quick trip back to page 10. I think it was something along the lines of:
Cowardice is a trait that sees board members hiding under the chair each time the chief executive walks into the room. To clarify, that’s the seat with four legs, not a pile of pinstripes underneath the head director. “What now?!” is the panicked thought running through the nervous mind. Change is the enemy, monotony is the friend. The key here is that if you never challenge anyone, you never have to lose! How perfect is that?
Complacency comes when... Well, we all know the answer already, don’t we? There’s nothing more really to learn about our company. Plus, there’s such a high turnover these days, for some strange reason, that it’s hard to keep up anyway. Which is fine, because we can continue to sit back with our feet up doing the crossword. Five across: four-letter word for simple, beginning with E and ending in Y. Elementary.
Concealment, also known as under-the-floor boards. If you can’t see it, it isn’t there and so isn’t worth talking about, which means it isn’t there and so you can’t see it. Notice something smelling off? There’s a handy duo called a brush and a rug that you can employ, especially in emergencies. Communion is key. No, commutation. No, computation… I can’t find the words.
Hang on a minute, this isn’t ringing true, something about those three Cs seems a bit upside down. Which incidentally is not how you would choose your board to be either. Apparently, it’s better to think on your feet.
As we have discussed, there are many types of director. No one-size-fits-all. So, perfect is impossible. But terrible is certainly avoidable. And – somewhere in the middle of these extremes – is someone with courage, curiosity and communicativeness (the actual three Cs!).
Emma Rowland is policy adviser at the Institute of Directors. Read her satirical take on key developments in the IoD Policy Updates weekly newsletter on LinkedIn
Ellie Jobes CDir Group People Director, Bagnalls
Good leaders bring people with them.
Ellie Jobes, Director at Bagnalls, became a Chartered Director in 2025. The programme asked things of her she wouldn’t have sought out herself — chairing a board meeting and learning to critically evaluate a set of accounts. “It wasn’t something I would readily have put myself forward for,” she says. “But being put in that position was really helpful.”
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Centre thought
Ben Walker photography Julian Dodd
Of all the bars in all the world, Daisy Cooper had to walk into this one. The Horn in St Albans is renowned for blooding new bands, and for tribute acts (pseudo Bon Jovi and Arctic Monkeys featured recently). On the night Cooper turned up, she found herself closing the show with an impromptu open mic.
The rules were clear: no cameras, no video, let your hair down. “They put my name next to the final song of the night: Bohemian Rhapsody,” Cooper, deputy leader and Treasury spokeswoman for the Liberal Democrats, recalls. “And then I heard someone say, ‘Oh it’s the MP, she’s coming on stage.’”
Neither the crowd nor the local press had got the memo. “All the cameras and phones then came out,” Cooper says. “That was the only bit that
got filmed. The local newspaper was there and got a snap. And that was the front page of the magazine.”
Said magazine cover now resides on the wall of Cooper’s office, a permanent reminder that life, like politics, is erratic: that sometimes you must take things as they come to you. The opinion polls indicate little about the likely balance of power following the next general election. Reform has the edge. But no party has managed to establish a convincing lead. The Liberal Democrats could again be kingmakers, just as they were in 2010. Would she be prepared to coalesce with a rival party?
“I always compare politics to athletics,” she says. “And you never think about what you do after you get over the finish line. You have to focus on how you’re going to run your best
I always compare politics to athletics. And you never think about what you do after you get over the finish line
Daisy Cooper would abolish the Treasury to boost growth
words
race and how you’re going to get your best result. The reality is that politics is so unpredictable at the moment, domestically and internationally. Any party that spends its time thinking about what it might do in all sorts of different scenarios after the general election is probably going to do really badly this side of it.”
Nevertheless, Cooper seems to hold the key to alliance-making: she is visibly popular among her opponents. When we meet, she is approached – at one point embraced – by Tory and Labour MPs in the gardens of the House of Commons. The sporting metaphors
could not be clearer – it is there in its title. It would align tax policy with infrastructure policy with investment policy, everything pulling in the same direction. It would be a one-stop shop for businesses and investors.”
A key role of the Department for Growth, she says, would be to create clear priorities on economic development: identify the major projects that are ripe for investment. A government that has myriad priorities for strategic infrastructure, she argues, has no priorities at all. “On the website of the Office for Investment, there’s close to 300 projects listed!” she says.
In politics, I like a bit of argy bargy. But I always think you should play the ball, not the man
play on: “In politics, I like a bit of argy bargy, a bit of cut and thrust,” she says. “But I always think you should play the ball, not the man. Every person here is a human being who has got a family, caring responsibilities. It’s a good thing in a workplace and in politics to try and get on with folk – even if you vehemently disagree with them on important points.”
Split and abolish
Her soft-edged amenability belies what is a hard policy position: Daisy Cooper is the Treasury spokeswoman who wants to abolish her own department. Its split personality – each persona conflicting with the other – means the premier business department should be not one ministry, but two, she says.
“The Treasury does too much,” Cooper tells Director. “When your role is in economic policy and public spending, short-term tax grabs always win out. Those tax grabs always end up overriding and undermining long-term economic growth.”
Cooper would split the Treasury into a Department for Growth and a Department for Public Spending, each independent of the other. The Grand Dame of 1 Horse Guards Road would no longer be asked to ride two ponies. “Why not have a Department for Growth?” says Cooper. “Its mandate
“So, if you’re an investor looking to invest in a low-risk, long-term project that has government backing, how on earth do you know which one to pick? Investors say to me, ‘We want a government that says, “We’ve got three projects – and these are the three that we’re going to deliver.”’ If government signals a direction, capital almost always follows.”
Cooper’s favoured trio of projects is East West Rail (a new line between Oxford and Cambridge); the completion of HS2; and a programme to improve energy connectivity with continental Europe. She is unconvinced by the case for airport expansion: “It can’t be done within existing climate emissions limits,” she says. “There is work going on to look at sustainable aviation fuel. If there are technological changes that enable this to be done, then let’s have that conversation. But the onus is on the airports to demonstrate that they can expand in a way that will produce the highly paid jobs that they claim it’s going to – and that they can do it within the climate emissions framework that we need to stay within.”
Global goodwill
This avowed internationalist might resist aviation expansion, yet she nevertheless wants Britain to spread
its wings. Characteristically for a Liberal Democrat, she is passionately Europhilic. She worries that what she terms the “tweet diplomacy” of former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss has undermined trust with the UK’s neighbours, such that transcontinental projects that could bolster growth and energy security remain a distant dream.
Direct high-speed rail links from the UK to Milan, Cologne, Frankfurt and other key mercantile cities require cooperation beyond that which exists now. “When you want to go into negotiations on infrastructure, it requires a basic level of trust – people thinking that you’re going into those negotiations with goodwill,” she says. “It is an absolute prerequisite for any kind of economic conversation about infrastructure. We would like there to be far more cooperation on transport projects and on energy. There are huge opportunities there for us in driving down bills, getting economic growth, improving sustainable travel. But first, they require a political commitment to work with European allies and neighbours in a productive way.”
Despite this, she remains equivocal about the government’s European Partnership Bill for dynamic alignment, which seeks to smooth cross-border trade by removing discrepancies in product standards between the EU and UK across a raft of sectors.
“It seems to me as though what they’re going to do is bring this bill forward, but without allowing any scrutiny of the secondary legislation,” she says. “Now I’m pro-European, but I also believe that the British Parliament should have a say. It could be very dangerous if the government is trying to do a reset, but doesn’t allow our own parliament to have any say on the secondary legislation. It could lead to some big disasters. This government is not very good at negotiating. When Starmer went to Europe and came back with his deal, he absolutely shafted some communities when he didn’t need to. Having a stronger deal with Europe – getting a better relationship with Europe – is a priority, but there are questions about how you do it.”
Securing startups
Closer to home, Cooper prudently
declines to be drawn on policy detail three years out from a general election. Yet she offers hints on startups and retail – two areas where she suggests the government has failed. “We are a very entrepreneurial country, right?” she says. “It’s deep in our history and our culture. And we rightly celebrate the fact that we are one of the startup capitals of the world. But, as an American said to me, ‘You always fatten the veal.’ That meant we are great at startups, but as soon as those firms
get to a certain size, they’re poached by other countries that offer them amazing packages to go abroad, where they suddenly scale… There are two issues – one is the tax burden, the other is accessing the funding. There is an opportunity to look at tax relief to make sure startups can stay here.”
Cooper has been campaigning for the reform of business rates, she says, “for longer than I’ve been a member of Parliament”. Her seat, St Albans, has a thriving centre. Other towns and
cities are less fortunate. Traditionally, the relative affluence of high streets has been framed as a symptom of local consumer confidence. Yet Cooper sees it, too, as a cause
“High streets are so important,” she says. “A lot of everyday folk who have busy, complicated lives don’t follow GDP stats, don’t follow unemployment statistics – sometimes they don’t even follow interest rates. They just walk out of their front door, they take one look at their high street, and if it’s looking good, they’ve got confidence that the economy is working. But if there are empty shops and it’s downtrodden... people generally think that the economy isn’t working for their area.
“It’s a real litmus test of confidence in the economy, and in the system. And that is why I am so determined that we will be the party of the high street. Part of that is around business rates, because it’s a very outdated system that penalises bricks-and-mortar businesses.”
Cooper knows the streets of which she speaks. The Horn isn’t the only watering hole in St Albans to enjoy her company. The city, she claims, “has more pubs per square mile than anywhere else in the UK. People wanted to come to London to sell their wares. They would stop overnight with the horses in St Albans. So we’ve got loads of beautiful pubs. And as a result of that, I am a campaigner to save pubs.”
Hertfordshire’s hostelries might be thankful for her support. Yet they might never hear her dulcet tones again. “I am not a keen singer,” she admits. Some other musical star-turn perhaps? “I play the piano, I play the violin,” she says. She reaches for a silver tankard from an All Party Parliamentary Group on Beer: “But I did also win an award for being pub parliamentarian of the year in 2024 – so that gives you an insight into what I do after work.”
Ben Walker is editor of Director
DIRECTOR DISTILLED Department for Growth proposed
Tax breaks for startups and high streets mooted
Airport expansion opposed under current conditions
Gradually, then suddenly
The Credit Suisse collapse reveals the patterns boards fail to see
Cautionary tales with Roger Barker
Most boards believe they can anticipate a crisis before it arrives. The collapse of Credit Suisse suggests that confidence may be misplaced.
The bank’s failure in March 2023 was not caused by a single catastrophic decision. It arose from an accumulation of failures that directors repeatedly declined to treat as symptoms of an underlying malaise. One of the world’s oldest financial institutions, with 167 years of history behind it, effectively disappeared in a matter of days – to the consternation of those who had believed it was too big to fail.
Ernest Hemingway captured the dynamic well, albeit in a different context. In The Sun Also Rises, the character Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Campbell replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” Credit Suisse followed that trajectory with remarkable precision.
Prior to its collapse, the bank had been weakened by events that were individually damaging, but apparently manageable. Two episodes in 2021 proved particularly severe. The collapse of supply-chain finance firm Greensill Capital left Credit Suisse scrambling to recover billions of dollars from investment funds it had marketed to clients. Shortly afterwards, the implosion of hedge fund Archegos Capital Management cost the bank more than $5 billion. Both episodes exposed serious weaknesses in risk management, internal controls and board oversight.
These were not isolated reputational shocks. In the years leading up to the collapse, Credit Suisse had already been associated with a series of controversies and compliance failures. These included a high-profile corporate espionage scandal that led to senior departures in 2019. Each episode generated media headlines and internal reviews. Yet none appeared to trigger the deeper institutional reckoning that the accumulation of events arguably demanded.
What is striking in hindsight is not that specific mishaps occurred. Large, complex institutions experience operational failures from time to time. What matters is that neither the events themselves, nor the broader pattern they formed, triggered the fundamental reassessment that was clearly warranted. The board replaced executives, reorganised divisions and announced strategic resets. Yet the underlying question – whether these episodes reflected something structurally wrong with the institution’s culture – was never convincingly addressed.
The consequence was a pattern that outsiders could often see more clearly than those inside the
Prior to its collapse, the bank had been weakened
by events
organisation. Multiple chief executives arrived, attempted turnarounds and departed. Each transition produced new restructuring plans and fresh uncertainty. Reputational damage accumulated. Confidence – the most fragile asset in banking – eroded gradually, and then, in the end, suddenly. By late 2022, deposit outflows were accelerating, the share price had fallen sharply, and investors were openly sceptical that any recovery plan would succeed. In practice, the market had already delivered its verdict.
When the end came, it came quickly. In March 2023, turmoil among regional US banks turned market attention towards institutions perceived as vulnerable. Credit Suisse, already hollowed out by years of accumulated damage, became the focus. Within days, a full-scale crisis of confidence was underway. Liquidity pressures intensified. The
that an outright failure posed a systemic risk, brokered an emergency acquisition by UBS. The ‘suddenly’ had arrived.
Governance failures rarely arrive as dramatic emergencies. More often, they emerge as a succession of issues that appear manageable in isolation: a legal problem the general counsel assures the board is under control; an episode of executive misconduct quietly swept under the carpet; a product failure explained away. None of these developments, taken individually, appear existential. Viewed together, however, they reveal a deeper pattern. The real governance failure is not the existence of these problems. It is the board’s failure to recognise that they form a pattern at all.
Dr Roger Barker is chief research of�icer at the Center for Governance, Saudi Arabia
The lesson
When ‘one-o ’ events continue to recur, they are no longer oneo s. Every large organisation faces occasional operational setbacks. The discipline boards must apply is to ask, after the second or third significant incident, whether they are part of a bigger picture. At Credit Suisse, each controversy was addressed on its own terms. The cumulative red flag –that the institution’s risk culture and controls were structurally inadequate – was not confronted early enough or forcefully enough.
1
Risk oversight requires genuine authority – not just formal structures and policies. Both the Greensill and Archegos episodes exposed a gap between the bank’s formal risk framework and its actual practice. Boards should ask not merely whether a risk function exists, but whether it has the authority and independence to escalate concerns before they become crises. If significant exposures consistently surprise the board, the riskmanagement architecture is failing.
2
Leadership instability is a symptom as much as a cause. The rapid succession of chief executives at Credit Suisse was both a product of the bank’s problems and a driver of future di culties. Boards should be wary of treating leadership change as the primary solution. When the same institution requires repeated restructuring under successive leaders, the problem rarely lies principally with individuals. It lies in something more deeply embedded: in culture, in incentives, or in the board’s own willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.
3 Reputational decline moves faster than boards typically assume – especially in the hyperconnected digital era. By the time the damage becomes visible in share prices or deposit flows, it has usually been accumulating for years. Acting on reputational signals before they become obvious crises is one of the board’s most di cult judgement calls. It is also one of the most important.
Gen Why
There is no single path into entrepreneurship: people go into business for myriad reasons. Yet what unites many millennial entrepreneurs is the search for a purpose beyond profit. Director meets three millennials who honed their competitive advantage by serving others
words Ben Walker
photography Phil Adams
The high flyer
W hen Julianne Ponan was nine years old, she was given just four hours to live. Ponan suffers from anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction that strikes in seconds and requires immediate treatment. “I had to go under, have an operation. They didn’t know if I was going to make it at all,” she tells Director The ordeal drove the young Ponan to ensure she would use her life to improve the world for others like her. “My mum said to me, ‘Do everything quicker, make an impact, leave a legacy.’”
There are around 6,000 hospital admissions a year for food-induced anaphylactic shock, according to NHS England. Less than 48 hours after meeting Director, Ponan again became one of them. “Two bites of bread and I ended up in anaphylaxis, rushed to hospital in an ambulance.” It was the 14th time she has been admitted.
Creative Nature Superfoods are now available in several UK supermarket chains, 18 countries – and onboard nine airlines. Ponan has since launched SkyRate – a free app that lets air travellers rate individual carriers on allergen safety and availability of allergen-free nutrition. “Imagine being at 35,000ft and worried about an allergic reaction onboard,” she says. “You want the right products without any ‘may contains’. You want to be able to inform the crew. You want to know that you can wipe down the seat. You need to know whether you can even board at all – sometimes they won’t let anaphylactics board!”
Ponan received an MBE in 2023 for her services to business, exports and people with allergies. “The MBE was out of this world,” she says. “I never expected it – I actually thought it was a scam!” Further stellar achievements
I wanted to create a company that genuinely had a mission. It’s really important to have a ‘why’
When anaphylaxis strikes, it is terrifying. Yet it leaves in its wake something more subtle, more sinister. “No one tells you about the ‘after’,” Ponan writes on LinkedIn. “The anxiety that follows anaphylaxis. The worry about eating anything. The exhaustion. The confusion of trying to work out how this happened when you are so careful.”
Some 40,000 people in the UK have been affected by the condition in their lifetime, according to research from the University of Oxford. It has a debilitating effect on quality of life. Nowhere is safe. Every outing bears a threat. That is why Ponan launched her business Creative Nature Superfoods – a range of products that are free from the most prevalent 14 allergens. “I wanted to create a company that helped people – that really, genuinely had a purpose and a mission,” she says. “I started because there were so many people like me left to sit alone at the allergy table. No one should feel like that... It’s really important to have a ‘why’.”
include her 2019 appearance in Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ entrepreneurs. “I was super-excited to be on that list,” says Ponan, now 36. “But the real thing, the thing that I get out of bed for, is when I get a letter from a mum who says to me that it’s the first time their child has eaten cake. That’s huge.”
What is the best piece of advice you have been given?
“When you feel like quitting, think about why you started in the first place. Many people lose their way. Many women get imposter syndrome. I’ve been there, but wake up in the morning and do it anyway.”
What would you say to your 21-yearold self?
“Start earlier, don’t wait – there’s never going to be a perfect time to start a business. You’re never going to have the perfect amount of money or the perfect amount of time. You just need to put one foot in front of the other.”
The comeback queen
I n early adulthood, Veenoo Sharma’s world collapsed. “My key entrepreneurial journey really started during my father’s bankruptcy,” she tells Director “We came from a very successful property development background in Scotland. But during one property cycle, my father’s business went bust.”
She was, she says, “propelled into entrepreneurship” rather than choosing it naturally. “At the time, entrepreneurship wasn’t the buzzword it is now,” she recalls.
“For me, it was more for survival. Then I realised I had a flair for it, and that I very much enjoyed it.”
When her father’s firm went bankrupt, Sharma was studying law. She aimed to become a barrister. “But we had to make cash, fast, and bring ourselves out from the situation we were in,” she recalls. “So I said to myself, ‘Let’s go on Google and find the job that pays the most.’ And I inadvertently found myself on the trading floor of an investment bank.” Her first forays into blood-and-thunder capitalism were largely unsuccessful. “I was wiped the floor with for the first two years,” she says. “But it was the best learning experience – the start of my entrepreneurship journey – and from there I’ve never looked back.”
Last year, Sharma was appointed diaspora entrepreneurship adviser to the Commonwealth and co-chair of the India–Pakistan Initiative at the Commonwealth Businesswomen’s Network. Did the series of mini-failures maketh the woman? “I would not even call them mini!” says the 41-year-old. “I would call them maxi-failures! Huge, fundamental, life-shaking. But prior to those I led a very sheltered life. I learned when you are at rock bottom, when you have nothing to lose, your risk-taking appetite increases, and it catapults you in different directions. I tried lots of things, and I failed many times until I came into my own niche.”
When you are at rock bottom, when you have nothing to lose, your risk-taking appetite increases, and it catapults you in different directions
Building on her Commonwealth appointments, Sharma this year launched at the Houses of Parliament The Power Diaspora Forum, a global platform designed to enhance women’s access to capital and influence. “Up until this point, every business venture of mine had been about accumulating wealth – born of that survival mentality,” she says. “But I enjoyed the element of service, enjoyed helping other people, even when I had nothing. So, for me, it was, ‘How do we take all the challenges that women face in business?’”
Her earlier forays in the construction industry framed her worldview: “How do we crack the code of traditionally male-dominated industries?” she says. “Being made to feel like you do not belong – whether that be in political spheres or maledominated boardrooms. Most women feel that way.”
How does she herself crack that code? “I go and approach the man that most intimidates me in the room first –it sometimes shocks those people that I do that,” she reveals. “I did it recently at King Charles’ Commonwealth commemoration. There were spectacular men who I had not yet met through the Commonwealth – and I thought this a great opportunity for me to speak to them. They looked extremely intimidating. They’re not people who I normally speak to. But they were the first people who I approached. It’s about facing those challenges head on.”
What is the best piece of advice you have been given?
“Nobody is coming to save you, ladies. Go out there and do things for yourself.”
What would you say to your 21-yearold self?
“Invest in yourself first. When you invest in yourself, you invest in your future. At that age, we tend to invest in other people’s opinions of us – family, friends – and sometimes an expectation may be placed on us. But it’s important to look at yourself and think about what you want to do. That investment can be emotional, physical, mental – whatever it needs to be. It does not need to be related to business. It’s a mindset: you need to help yourself before you can help others.”
The pirouetting producer
Sabine Klaus-Carter came to the UK for one reason – but stayed for another. “My background is in Russian ballet,” she tells Director “I was semi-professionally trained. I came to Scotland because I loved the arts.” She studied filmmaking at the University of Dundee, gaining an MSc in electronic imaging, while performing her first, serendipitous, pivot. “It was 2008 – around the dawn of YouTube,” she recalls. “And a lot of businesses were looking for more cost-effective ways to get their filming and photography done, and I was right there, in the right place at the right time.” She persevered with the switch, launching her company Creation Editor, which works with a raft of clients, from tiny startups to giants such as Scottish Gas.
“I really fell in love with working with businesses,” she recalls. “I have a true passion for entrepreneurs – but also a true understanding. My dad had his own toy factory. Growing up, I saw the challenges and hardship that comes with being an entrepreneur, but also all the positives you can achieve, and I bring that understanding to my clients.”
Yet in 2020, at the height of the Covid lockdown, meeting those clients became near impossible. Klaus-Carter pivoted again, becoming a bread-maker. “I’m German – a bread country – so I invented an innovative, healthy flatbread,” she says. This former ballerina’s invention was on point: in 2021, she was crowned Great British Entrepreneur for Food & Drink for Scotland and Northern Ireland. Today, she is back with Creation Editor – with a sideline in screendance design.
Dancer, filmmaker, baker: where is her peak? “I’m not sure how to say it in English,” she admits, “but I just sort of stand up and everything happens all at once. I always aim high, and continue to grow and evolve.”
What is the best piece of advice you have been given?
“Work hard but have fun.”
What would you say your 21-year-old self?
“I am quite a bold person – and I have done probably quite bold things – but I would tell her to be even bolder.”
Ben Walker is editor of Director
See more from Julianne Ponan, Veenoo Sharma and Sabine Klaus-Carter on the Institute of Directors’ Instagram channel @instituteofdirectors
Attack of the clones
WORDS Matt Packer
ased in Seattle, but operating worldwide, Getty Images takes pride in its status as the planet’s foremost provider of visual content to the media. In a 2025 review of its activities, the company noted that its vast network of photographers and videographers had documented 160,000 different events – from areups in war zones to protests, natural disasters and key contests on the sporting calendar. Its business model hinges largely on cachet of exclusivity: the idea that only a Getty snapper in some obscure corner of the globe can get hold of the image you need to tell your story.
flareups the story.
image vistas in Facebook and other at the down different its Diffusion the Getty
But, there’s a problem. Getty and its main competitors are no longer in charge of high-quality image production and distribution – and real-life are far from the only game in town. Artificial intelligence (AI) outlets are encroaching on the traditionalists’ turf – and users can rapidly generate photorealistic imagery, even of the most fanciful simply by entering a few well-turned prompts. Friction between old and new came to a head November. Then, Getty achieved only partial success in a UK intellectual property (IP) lawsuit against Stability AI – a London-based startup backed by former Facebook president Sean Parker, counting among its board of directors none than Avatar director James Cameron. Heard High Court, the complex case was whittled during proceedings to two issues related to erent branches of IP: copyright and trademarks. On the first point, Getty alleged that, overseas, Stability had trained its image generator Stable usion on copyrighted works – including Gettyowned images. Getty argued that downloads of tool by UK users therefore amounted to the importation of infringing copies. On that score, was unsuccessful. In her ruling, Justice Joanna Smith held that, while the latest version of Stable Diffusion was trained on copyrighted works
AI has firms’ intellectual property in its crosshairs. But the fightback has begun
outside the UK, the tool copies of the images themselves.
On the second point, infringement, on the grounds – and that of its subsidiary up emblazoned across some outputs. Here, Getty prevailed. judgement, the public would that Stability was utilising marks for commercial purposes – despite Stability’s contention that it is users who ultimately dictate the appearance of the images they make with the tool.
Bottomless pit
A mixed bag, then, for Getty one that it has since obtained appeal. But importantly, shifting sands in the company’s is no one-off Indeed, it is legal actions that has unfolded between traditional IP rights entertainment, and a crop platforms seeking to make
June 2025 Universal Studios Spielberg’s DreamWorks in a major copyright lawsuit AI (Gen-AI) platform Midjourney, defendant “a bottomless
October 2025 A Disney forced chatbot purveyor the studio’s character designs
December 2025 Another desist lashed out at Google studio’s IP rights “on a massive contain
Getty alleged trademark that its watermark iStock – had turned of Stable Diffusion’s Smith’s the of dynamic, new AI a splash. For example: and Steven plagiarism”. cease-and-desist letter
Disney cease-and-
assimilating “a large corpus” of works without permission to train and develop Gen-AI tools.
February 2026 Disney – yes, them again – issued a further cease-and-desist, this time to Chinese tech giant ByteDance, accusing it of mounting a “virtual smash-and-grab” on its IP, including characters from its Star Wars and Marvel stables.
Perhaps this isn’t about shifting sands after all, then – but faultlines. “This is a volatile period for copyright owners,” says Gosia Evans, senior solicitor in the intellectual property team at commercial law firm Harper James. “The vast majority of them are concerned about the direction in which AI is developing and the risks this poses, in terms of diluting the protection of their works and reducing their income.”
Crucially, Evans points out, smaller traditional rights holders – without Disney-sized libraries of protected works – have neither the negotiating muscle nor the funds to enforce their rights against AI companies, especially not on a repeat basis. “It’s not sustainable or efficient,” she says – while acknowledging that the gravitational pull towards enforcement is only likely to intensify. “This is a real problem – alongside the difficulties of tracking how, when and where copyrighted works have been used, which is the kind of evidence that would typically be required in any potential proceedings.”
and business committed to ethical innovation in media works created with, or manipulated by, AI. In the past couple of years, the network has paid close attention to UK government efforts to overhaul copyright law, or – as some have warned – eviscerate it.
Dr Dominic Lees is associate professor of filmmaking at the University of Reading and head of its Synthetic Media Research Network (SMRN): a community of stakeholders from academia
Fight for rights
Spearheaded by former technology secretary Peter Kyle, the incoming Labour government sought to carve out an exception for AI companies that would essentially declare all creative content fair game for the appetites of AI large language models (LLMs) – unless creators themselves opted out. In other words, a total inversion of how copyright law had worked for centuries. “Big Tech is desperate for huge quantities of data,” says Dr Lees. “And the creative industries generate vast amounts. AI developers had already been using scraping methods to absorb that data into their foundation models in breach of copyright. So, they’d lobbied for a change in the law to ensure that the practice would be retroactively legalised. Creators were outraged, because copyright is absolutely fundamental to the economics of an industry that’s much, much bigger than AI.”
Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys vice-president Daniel Hardman-Smart provides ten tips for brand owners anticipating battles with AI platforms
1 Ensure you have a full record, including chain of title, of any copyright you own.
2 Consider design protection when producing new logos or characters.
3 If you are planning to launch any new digital or AI-based goods and services, protect them with strategic trademark filings – and licensing partnerships.
5 Consider extending that monitoring to AI platforms through methods such as manual AI prompting checks.
6 Register appropriate IP rights based upon findings from brand enforcement programmes: thorough investigations of brand misuse.
7 Consider whether, in addition to IP abuse, you have suffered wider breaches of online or regulatory laws.
4 Employ specialist watching services to monitor third-party trademark applications and online content for signs of efforts to imitate your brand.
8 Look to work directly with AI platforms to prevent unauthorised outputs of your IP.
9 Collaborate with your organisation’s PR and marketing teams to ensure there is a contingency plan for any unwanted use of your brand and related assets. That will empower you to react quickly.
10 Keep rigorously up to date with all legal, technological and policy developments in this fast-evolving arena.
Big Tech is desperate for huge quantities of data, and the creative industries generate vast amounts of a very high quality
For Lees, the government’s error was to listen to one industry and not the other. When ministers did at last consult with creators, they were deluged with 11,500 responses. In March, in response to the feedback, the government published its long-awaited Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Music composer Ed Newton-Rex, chief executive of Fairly Trained, which certifies Gen-AI companies for ethical training practices, used social media to signal his deflation at what he deemed a lack of closure. While he welcomed a decision to drop the broad exception idea that had lingered on from the Kyle era, Newton-Rex stressed that the report leaves the door open for other AI concessions to be introduced later.
Enhanced protection
Evans and Lees have a few ideas about the sort of approach the government should pursue. “We may need to head in the direction of a robust, national licensing system,” Evans says. “It would involve a degree of formalisation and/or centralisation of copyright governance, plus a collective licensing element. Participation should be compulsory for all AI developers and voluntary for copyright owners –but recommended in the sense that it would offer them enhanced protection and licensing fees that they would otherwise struggle to recover.”
Evans stresses that any such system would require proper resources and specialist teams who would understand how to manage it. While it would not provide all the answers, she says: “The starting point should always be that the work may be protected by copyright – and should not, without express permission, be used by a human being or a machine developed and ultimately managed by humans.”
and should also consider sourcing specialist advice on registering trademarks and applying them to their output where appropriate. Other practical measures may include the use of ‘robots.txt’ files to prevent scraping, metadata tags indicating that images cannot be used for training AIs, and/or cloaking – a process whereby third-party software subtly modifies content on an ongoing basis to ensure it eludes scraping tools.
SMRN takes a similar stance. “In our submission to the consultation, one of our proposals was for the government to play a major role in organising a marketplace for datasets,” says Lees. “That would enable creators to negotiate a good price to license their assets. That way, foreign and homegrown AI developers could access them easily in the knowledge that, once they’ve paid up, they’re no longer in legal jeopardy.”
That would not, Lees notes, require any kind of sweeping legal overhaul. “UK copyright law isn’t broken,” he stresses. “It’s very effective and has exactly the impact we want: it stimulates the creative industries.”
By contrast, he points out, AI developers could certainly think about doing things a little differently. In fact, some already are. “Bria – one [AI] company I’ve talked to a lot – has built an alternative image generator to Midjourney,” Lees explains. “They have a button labelled ‘Attribution’, so that when you’ve finished prompting your picture, it tags the four, five or six photographs in its foundation model that contributed most to the output and automatically compensates the artists who created them.
“When I told the CEO about how other AI companies are saying, ‘Our LLM is all one big soup – we can’t tell who did what,’ she just said: ‘Utter lies.’”
For now, she notes, IP owners should put copyright notices and watermarks on their works, Matt Packer is a business and legal journalist
Floor or flaw? Should it be
The government has committed to eradicate the lower minimum wage rate for under21s. With younger people struggling to find work, could this be counterproductive?
D-J A Bennett, founder TIMBER | ROC
Y
es! For one fundamental reason: they are our future. I am deeply invested in ensuring that the next generation not only enters the workforce, but thrives within it. Employers like me are eager to develop the next generation. We want to equip them with the skills, confidence and experience needed to secure a strong future. However, this aspiration is increasingly constrained by affordability and that, fundamentally, is the problem.
For those aged 18-20, life is often still rooted at home, supported by parents or guardians. These formative years are not solely about income, but about gaining essential life experience, much of which comes through employment. Most of us can recall our earliest jobs and employers who shaped our attitudes, discipline and ambitions. These experiences are foundational pathways to future careers. Yet they are increasingly at risk of being denied by well-intentioned, but deceptional, policy changes.
From an employer’s perspective, the decision to hire a young person is not without significant consideration. Over the past six years, the cost of employing 18-20-year-olds has risen by as much as 68%. This is intensified by increasing National Insurance contributions and rising business rates. Taking on a young employee or apprentice is an investment which carries risks. I need
to consider the years of training, absorb the cost of inevitable mistakes and accept that a meaningful return may not materialise until much later, if at all. Even then, there is no guarantee the individual will remain within the business once qualified. Most wages are performance-based, so hard work will be rewarded, usually in the form of a pay rise.
By levelling wages across age groups, the short-term effects seem minimal, yet the long-term impact excludes an entire generation. Faced with two candidates – one over 21, with greater life and work experience, and another younger with less – most employers will understandably choose the safer option.
Young people should have the freedom to explore different roles and jobs, and to discover where their strengths and passions lie. At the same time, employers need the flexibility to offer these opportunities without disproportionate financial risk. Moderated wage structures enable this balance.
Currently, we risk denying an entire generation access to what might be called the greatest education of all: the university of life. Therefore, we need to create conditions that make it viable and worthwhile for businesses to invest in young people. Do that, and employers will play a pivotal role in solving youth unemployment.
cheaper to hire the young?
When the National Minimum Wage was introduced in 1999, there were warnings it would lead to widespread job losses. But after more than two decades, the feared wave of unemployment has not materialised.
Instead, the minimum wage has become one of the most stable features of the UK economy, raising incomes for millions of low-paid workers.
Young workers face the same rising costs as everyone else: rent, transport, food
Afzal Rahman, Trades Union Congress policy lead in pay and employment
The policy has also supported local economies. Lower-paid workers tend to spend most of what they earn in their communities – at local shops, cafés, hairdressers and pubs – helping businesses and high streets to thrive. When work pays fairly, it strengthens both families and the wider economy.
But there is one part of the system that increasingly looks out of step with these principles: separate minimum wage rates for young workers. Under the current system, two employees doing the same work, for the same employer, can legally be paid different wages simply because of their age.
The government has already recognised this problem and has pledged to abolish youth minimum wage rates as part of its Employment Rights Act. Some critics have urged caution, pointing to concerns about young people who are not in education, employment or training (Neet). These concerns deserve serious consideration, as we know long periods of worklessness when people are young follow them through their working lives.
But it is important to look at the evidence, as the risk the other way is
that young people’s wages are held back unnecessarily. The latest data for Q4 2025 shows us that Neet rates have decreased over the year for 16-17- and 18-20-year-olds. And evidence suggests the labour market has already moved ahead of the youth rates policy.
Recent analysis by the TUC shows most employers are already choosing to pay young workers more than the legal minimum. Statistics published in March 2026 show that around one million 18–20-year-olds – 85% of those in work – are paid above the youth minimum wage. Even more striking, around 740,000 young workers – 63% of those in employment – are already paid at or above the full adult minimum wage.
Young workers face the same rising costs as everyone else: rent, transport, food and energy. Ensuring that workers are paid the same rate for the same job is a straightforward matter of fairness and common sense.
The evidence is clear: fair pay is consistent with high employment rates. Economies do not grow when pay is held down.
D-J
A Bennett and Afzal Rahman were talking to business journalist Nick Martindale
‘Marketing and advertising are the same’
No. The two sectors are linked – but distinct
Marketing mythology with Chris Daly
Advertising is the most visible manifestation of a brand’s presence. It is an artform with a rich cultural history and global market reach. It can tap into cultural insights – and leverage them to connect with consumers on an emotional level. Creative advertising can transcend media spend and gain momentum that extends brand influence far beyond paid touchpoints like sponsored social posts, or TV and radio advertising.
But it is not just a creative or artistic endeavour; it can also be a significant strategic investment. This is exemplified by multimillionpound valuations for premium advertising slots at high-profile sporting events like the World Cup or Super Bowl. Putting your brand in front of millions – perhaps even billions – of eyeballs can deliver significant results for an organisation. Yet visibility alone is no guarantee of success.
For the modern enterprise, the ability to broadcast your product or service to a specific target audience is a primary lever for revenue generation. Yet it represents only the surface of a significantly more complex strategic engine. To be effective in the modern consumer landscape – where both the physical and digital worlds are saturated with highly targeted, algorithm-driven campaigns – advertising must be underpinned by the rigorous application of marketing theory and best practice. Equating advertising with marketing is a common error. They are not synonymous. Advertising is a vital cog in the engine of growth driven by marketing.
The marketing mix
The marketing mix enables organisations to understand the most fundamental questions of business: ‘What are we selling’, ‘Why are we selling it?’ and ‘Who are we selling it to?’ Without this foundation, advertising becomes a game of chance, resulting in inefficient capital allocation and a potentially expensive, and significant, brand risk.
The ‘4 Ps’, first proposed by E Jerome McCarthy in the early 1960s, serve as the strategic blueprint for any enterprise. This framework outlines the marketing mix which forces organisations to take a holistic view of the market and their activity within it. The 4 Ps are Product and Price, which enable marketers to define value propositions and ensure that the price aligns with market positioning; Place, which determines the availability of the product; and Promotion, which is where advertising sits – with the goal of raising awareness of a product or brand. The 4 Ps were later expanded to seven: People, Physical Evidence and Process entered the fray in the 1980s.
Within the framework, Promotion sits on an equal footing with all the other elements. Thus, advertising should not be viewed as an isolated discipline, but as a precise and targeted tactic for promotion. By anchoring advertising within this wider view, firms can ensure that tactical messaging is still relevant to the core value proposition and the strategic objectives of the business.
A strategy built on validated market insights transforms advertising from being reactive and experimental into a scalable engine for revenue growth. By clearly identifying and articulating the what, the why and the who, leaders can provide the necessary guardrails to ensure that budgets are focused on the most receptive channels. When the strategic foundations have been laid correctly, guesswork is removed from the equation. The teams responsible for creative execution can direct budget towards the highest-value customer segments. This structural rigour can be the difference between driving revenue and wasting money.
Theory into action
An optimised marketing strategy ensures that advertising functions as a well-oiled component within the organisation’s growth strategy The approach helps firms move away from experimentation, towards a more proactive and sustainable model. It is a crucial shift: it ensures that advertising activity delivers long-term measurable outcomes – rather than temporary, short-term boosts.
Leaders must ensure that the creative teams responsible for tactical execution are fully equipped with the empirical data and the insights they need. Without this, tactical output can become separated from the core value proposition and the needs of the customer, reducing both impact and effectiveness.
Vanity metrics – such as clicks and impressions – often fail to convert creative impact into commercial gain. To achieve this, the C-suite must prioritise the KPIs that illustrate value to the enterprise. These include Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Fundamentally, the value of marketing lies in its ability to provide strategic intelligence. It is the ultimate competitive advantage. Creating a feedback loop that allows for the twoway exchange of customer insights and data is essential. This way, data and insights can be directly linked back to product and development teams, helping to inform future customer-orientated strategic decisions.
Great advertising sparks emotion. It shapes the way people see the world
that humanises brands and creates lasting emotional connections with consumers. The tools and technologies have evolved. But the fundamental principles of the craft remain.
Great advertising sparks emotion. It shifts culture. It shapes the way people see the world –but only when fuelled by the clarity provided by great strategic marketing.
Ensure that advertising has the freedom to break boundaries, exercise its creative flair, and create magical moments for customers – while being grounded in strategic intelligence provided by professional marketing.
Advertising and marketing are not interchangeable terms. But they are intrinsically linked. They are partners. And, when properly aligned, they unlock the ability to build brands that endure, inspire and drive meaningful, responsible and sustainable economic value.
The emotional connection
Advertising remains a cornerstone of both commerce and culture.
It is a tactical lever for growth. But it is also a sophisticated and much-loved cultural medium
Chris Daly is chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Marketing
Helena McLeod Former Deputy Director-General, Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI)
Helena McLeod completed the IoD’s Global Certificate in Company Direction in 2025. The programme gave her the rigour to be more effective across different types of board, in different parts of the world. “That forward thinking,” she says, “is what differentiates an average leader from a great one.”
Global Certificate in Company Direction 10-16 October 2026, Fairmont Hotel, St Andrews, Scotland
Boardroom excellence, with a global perspective.
Join the 2026 cohort, scan QR code to register interest or visit iod.com/l/global-certificate for more information. Limited spaces available.
The paradoxpipeline
The march of AI is creating a leadership timebomb
WORDS MaryLou Costa
ow important is the bottom layer of a house of cards? Putting the question to AI provides a response that is practical yet eerily profound. And also a little ironic. A weak bottom layer, it says, “is the fastest way to cause a collapse, making its precision and strength the most vital part of building a high, stable card tower”.
H
Replace ‘house of cards’ with ‘company’ and you can see where both the significance and the irony come from. Thanks to AI-driven efficiencies, companies have found themselves at liberty to cut roles where the bulk of tasks have been swallowed up by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and their ilk.
The reality is that many of those tasks have – until now – been part of roles that occupied that fabled bottom layer: think data analysis and entry, market and competitor research, customer feedback collation, report and presentation creation. As many will remember, these and other administrative tasks are how knowledge economy graduates typically spent the formative years of their corporate lives. They put in the hours. They earned the brownie points. All the while quietly absorbing how the business and the environment around it worked, until they were deemed mature enough to take the next step that would add real value, from becoming client-facing to taking ownership of certain workstreams.
But now that bottom layer is slowly being chipped away at. As consultancy Korn Ferry’s 2026
Talent Acquisition Trends report reveals, 43% of companies plan to replace roles with AI. Entrylevel positions are among the most a ected, with 37% of organisations targeting them.
A King’s College London analysis of millions of LinkedIn profiles and job postings confirms how that is unfolding in the economy. Firms whose workforces are highly exposed to AI capabilities reduced total employment by 4.5% on average between 2021 and 2025. The e ect is concentrated almost entirely in junior positions, which fell by 5.8% in the same period.
As a result, the mainstream media is full of headlines about the graduate jobs crisis. The BBC reported in January that 707,000 graduates in the UK were out of work and on benefits.
The hidden threat
That AI has made the bottom rung of the corporate ladder harder to reach is widely recognised. Yet there is a potent knock-on e ect that is being overlooked: who will be le to climb their way to the top? And will they learn to lead? Or just end up glorified managers of AI tools and outputs?
“There are going to be fewer opportunities in entry-level roles to build those experiences: to build that muscle around sense-making, judgement, decision-making, trust and collaboration,” says Jerry Collier, who leads Korn Ferry’s EMEA assessment and succession practice.
“Businesses now have to think, if there are going to be fewer experiences from ‘doing’, junior talent needs to be put closer to where the judgement, sense-making, human stabilisation decisions are being made, so they can get closer to that earlier, to protect your future pipeline.
“This is about more intentional talent development. Yes, there might be fewer people in entry-level roles, so companies will need to be more deliberate about giving them that experience early, to elevate their role and impact.”
Simply asking humans to perform tasks that can be completed easily by machines is the wrong approach, warns Collier: “They need to ask: if that work can get done with AI, why are you hiring them?”
Collier’s action plan for companies that will be susceptible to a pipeline collapse involves identifying which early experiences actually build judgement, redesigning roles around decision exposure rather than just task execution, assigning junior hires a senior sponsor, putting them onto ‘stretch assignments’ earlier, and tracking leadership readiness from the beginning.
“If all you’re doing is sitting at the end of a screen training AI agents and editing AI content, you don’t learn any of these critical leadership activities, like strategic communication, making hard decisions, in uencing, sense-making, applying judgement, and prioritisation,” says Collier.
“Don’t just revamp the rotational programme you already had. You need to put graduates in situations where they’re going to be challenged and can observe high-pressure decisions being made, where people are having to make sense of multiple potential scenarios.”
He adds: “Give them a sponsor who can be more than a manager by opening up their network and access to opportunities, and share learning
AI will eat tasks for breakfast. It will become a critical concern across the whole business
resources. How do you blend all of that together into a programme that says, ‘I’m actually investing in my future leader pipeline?’
“What we don’t want these people doing is three months’ worth of photocopying. That’s not going to help them.”
Recalibrating hiring
Nick Glynne admits being in a “bad mood” since it became apparent that his 800-strong workforce will likely be cut by about two-thirds over the next three years. The reduction in headcount is, he says, fuelled largely by AI, but also accelerated by increases to National Insurance Contributions and the National Living Wage.
Glynne is chief executive and founder of the Buy It Direct Group, which owns brands such as Laptops Direct, Furniture 123 and Better Bathrooms. To make matters worse, he has also been trying to recover from a drop in consumer spending and a surge in shipping costs, which led to a £13 million loss in the 2022/2023 financial year.
Glynne used to take in around 20 graduates each year, and up to 25 apprentices. Now, he’s envisioning a much leaner overall yearly junior intake of no more than 12 people.
“It leaves this massive hollowing out of where succession is going to come from,” Glynne says. “The vast majority of our leaders in this business have come from within. When I try to bring in big hitters from the outside, most of the time, it fails. So succession has always worked, either deliberately or accidentally.”
Glynne is trying to fight the fires as they break out. First, do what’s needed to cut costs. Then, recalibrate how the business hires juniors.
“Can I bring in smart, younger people who I know I’m carrying for a period, knowing we’ll lose 20-30% of them, but we’re more likely to get our
next leaders from there?” Glynne wonders. “That’s the change we’d never have deliberately done. We would have brought in a wave of juniors, who would have all been doing junior work. This time, I’m going to have to speculate and get a handful of juniors in who actually don’t have a job to do. So how are we going to teach them to ‘create’ rather than teach them to ‘do’?”
To that end, Glynne has been working on an entrepreneurial programme that he will lead personally, designed to develop a new generation of commercial leaders – rather than hiring to simply do tasks, and eventually see who has leadership potential. He has been running an
“We have someone who, four years ago, joined the business in their first role from university. I worked directly with them in my role at the time as strate partner. We worked together on one of our bi est clients on a number of di erent projects. Now, he’s a senior consultant within the business, leading his own programmes. He’s winning his own work and building his own relationships.”
Going beyond entry-level
Cheney Hamilton is a senior lead analyst at Bloor Research, specialising in workplace transformation against what the consultancy has coined the
internal pilot. He plans to launch it externally in September.
“I want to make it challenging and give them real-world problems to solve,” he says. “For example, we’re exporting a lot to one particular country, but we’re not doing particularly well there. So how can we improve sales in that country? It’s a big job for a junior.
“They’ve got to have a competitive streak, whether that’s from sport or whether it’s because of having a difficult childhood, and they want to be able to prove themselves – that’s one absolute requirement. I’m looking for people who are unconventional and dare to think di erently.”
How to be succession savvy
Also moving from a ‘bums on seats’ to a more selective junior hiring model is brand consultancy Brandpie, led by Will Bosanko, who last year became the agency’s EMEIA chief executive aged just 30, a er four years with the business.
Bosanko says that while the 60-strong outfit tended to hire “reactively” to add to its junior consultant pool, it now plans to make just a handful of entry-level hires across each team. A key part of the agency’s succession planning strate has been its ‘buddy’ programme, where junior talent is partnered with a senior leader, shadowing them in projects and in client meetings.
Bosanko anticipates this will help the agency avoid a leadership gap in years to come.
“An example would be a strate partner buddying with a junior consultant who’s just entered the business,” says Bosanko. “They’d be working in lockstep with the strate partner, to understand the client, understand the dynamics. They’ll be exposed to client CEOs from an early stage, and have the opportunity to share their thinking with them.
‘fusion-work era’ – the merging of AI and humanled work.
She’s anticipating the unfolding of an epic corporate crisis due to AI-fuelled job-cuts in companies that have failed to redesign the remaining roles to be outcome-focused rather than task-based. This problem will a ect more than just entry-level roles, she warns. It will become a critical concern across the whole business. “AI will eat tasks for breakfast,” says Hamilton. “Because AI is going to deliver the outputs, humans have to deliver the outcomes
“Current job descriptions need to go,” she adds. “We’ve got to unleash creative thinking, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and leadership skills. These are the four big things that AI cannot do. If you don’t create value in a di erent way, all you’re doing is putting a death sentence on every single person in your organisation.”
MaryLou Costa is a journalist who specialises in the future of work
DIRECTOR DISTILLED
Junior roles should be revised to comprise decision-making experience
Firms that recreate roles that machines can do will fail
Jobs should be scoped on outcomes rather than tasks
End of conversation
We are training employees to talk to bots. They must learn to talk to other people
illions of pounds are being spent on bot diplomacy. It makes some sense: if we want bots to work for us, we must learn how to talk to them. But business is built on the strength of our relationships with other humans, not bots.
E&Y reports that 83% of UK employees use generative AI at work. Alive to the trend, companies are investing millions of pounds training their employees in prompt-engineering. They should be focusing on a communications strategy that strives to retain the art of conversation. Without immediate action, we risk a communications crisis, where we turn to
chatbots over humans. This would have disastrous consequences for business and society.
Talking timebomb
Tech companies have built entire empires on our preference for lazy, low-friction, uncomplicated messaging. Fast, digital transactional exchange is eclipsing conversation. Employees increasingly prefer to fire off an email, when the task would be resolved more quickly by picking up the phone. The trend has potentially grave consequences: without a clear communications strategy, messages are often lost in translation, leading to delays and costly mistakes. The decline in interpersonal skills is detrimental to business: success is founded on robust human relationships, where voice and conversation are essential.
Some of the problem is gendered. Barely half of men feel a ‘general chat’ is worthy of a phone call, compared to more than two-thirds of women.
Yet most of the problem is generational. Generation Z dislikes speaking on the phone. A Uswitch survey reveals that 70% of 18-34-year-olds prefer texting to phone calls. Some 37% prefer voice notes to an actual conversation.
Phone phobia is prevalent among the young. Many Zoomers report a fear of using the phone, saying that they experience anxiety during realtime conversations. More than half of 18-34-yearolds (56%) associate unplanned incoming calls with bad news. Little surprise that nearly a quarter (23%) never answer them. Phone conversations make many young people feel awkward. Thus, they avoid them.
There is a demographic timebomb ticking. Conversation is the intended victim. Yet technology cannot – and should not – replace using our voices to talk to each other. Paradoxical as it might sound, as generative AI penetrates the workplace, it becomes ever more imperative to encourage human-to-human interaction. Businesses must develop a communications strategy to ensure their messages to audiences are received as intended.
words Jonathan Sharp
Communications that have been written like AI will be increasingly ignored. Humans are already evolving to spot the too-perfect slop that screams inauthenticity
Talking up
To develop a communications strategy, businesses should ask three questions:
1 What are we trying to achieve?
2 Who is our audience?
3 Which channel, or combination of channels, is most suitable for our objective and audience?
Audiences include employees, customers, the media and suppliers. Determine whether you are informing, persuading, deciding, building or deepening a relationship, or supporting a customer with an issue.
Devise a set of key messages for all communications – including sales, marketing and HR – throughout the business. Strive for consistency and clarity. Precise, clear messaging is hard to achieve, yet worth the effort to deliver a competitive advantage.
Encourage a ‘close the loop’ culture, whereby employees working on a project together or attending a team meeting, whether via videoconferencing or in-person, are encouraged to summarise the meeting and identify next steps. Such summaries can be achieved with AI. But remember to discuss them subsequently over the phone, via videoconferencing or face-to-face. Conversation is the key to ensuring the intended actions are carried out.
Recruit well. Engage a specialist or in-house comms person to provide training on communicating clearly and concisely. These learnings should include AI-prompting, writing emails and briefs, and how to communicate with intent and express ideas in a succinct and structured way.
Avoid jargon. Most workplace tasks and discussions can, and should, be conveyed in plain English. If you operate in a jargon-filled industry, try to humanise it. English is the richest language in the world. Among the 171,476 words that feature in the Oxford English Dictionary, there is probably a real word to replace the jargon someone in your sector once contrived.
Clarity fosters transparency. It cultivates open communications where employees can communicate honestly about the positives and negatives of a project. Encourage senior managers to use the phone and videoconferencing, and arrange face-to-face meetings, to ensure communication flows freely and easily.
Communication collapse
Communication issues can hinder growth. A review of your internal communications likely reveals several issues of which you were unaware. Businesses often think they have a complex technical or process problem when, in fact, it is simply a communications problem that can be solved relatively easily.
It is vital that the review precedes the company-wide implementation of generative AI. That way, when AI is introduced, it can be framed as a part of the overall communications strategy rather than the default medium. An employee may talk to AI rather than a colleague. A customer may converse with an AI chatbot. But a phone call might be more valuable.
By creating a communication strategy and providing guidelines, your employees will take time to make a considered decision about which communication method to use – rather than just firing off a quick instant message or email. It will also make them aware that AI is intended to support communication, not replace it. Improved productivity, better collaboration and enhanced connection with employees and your customers, should result.
Technical knockout
The threat that people will become too reliant on AI is real. There are already cases of professionals treating its answers and outputs as definitive. Yet failing to fact-check LLMs is dangerous. This is why guardrails and processes are essential.
Businesses are learning to communicate with AIs through prompting. This makes strong communication skills more important, not less. Define your objective, audience and context. Set the right tone. If you don’t get what you desire, go back and ask the AI more questions. Build on what
you have. This can also benefit conversation skills. Using generative AI forces you to think of different ways to ask for what you need. It highlights any unclear thinking.
As we interact with AI more, it will become increasingly difficult to navigate human relationships. This is because AI’s answers are polished and designed to fulfil our needs and provide instant gratification, whereas humans are messy and imperfect.
Relying too much on AI for answers can also reduce our ability to empathise, which is a key facilitator of winning and retaining business. Algorithms can be programmed to express empathy. Yet real human emotion lies in listening to – and understanding – people who are angry, disappointed or judgemental. Dealing with human relationships is complex. AI is not trained to do it. Hence why most customers prefer speaking to a human over the automated, happy, perfect response of a chatbot. Humans do not behave like AIs. Nor do we wish them to.
Still, almost two billion people use AI today. Nearly nine in ten of those (88%) use it in at least one business function to improve efficiency and productivity. We use, or will use, AI in almost all communications – such as drafting emails, summarising calls and meetings, generating content for sales and marketing, and powering chatbots. But we must use AI to aid us, not direct us. Communications that have been written by AI will be increasingly ignored. Humans are already evolving to spot the too-perfect slop that screams inauthenticity. Your customers won’t be fooled. It probably seems ridiculous to Baby Boomers and Generation Xers that we should teach people to use the phone. Yet the need is real. Generation Z are digital natives. They prefer digital communications to the phone.
Providing training on soft skills is crucial as AI advances. Teach employees – particularly younger ones – how to handle difficult conversations on the phone and face-to-face. Hold workshops in active listening, critical thinking, questioning and storytelling. Help them develop their confidence in communicating with people in the real world, so they can resist the urge to hide in the digital shadows.
Businesses that implement an effective communications strategy, using many methods, will communicate more clearly and concisely, ensuring their messages reach the right audience. Leaders must address the communications emergency. They should strive to preserve human-to-human connection. The alternative future is grim. Without a better balance between communication and AI, we may not only get lost in translation but lose our voice completely.
Jonathan Sharp
is
chief executive of Britannic Technologies
So to speak What, when and why…
Phone
Best for urgent, complex or relationship-focused interactions
Should be modelled by leaders to normalise use
Human voice adds emotional clarity – our most powerful tool
Talking builds the human skills we must retain, such as listening, empathy and sharing experiences in real time
Videoconferencing
Ideal for distributed team collaboration or shared screens
Avoid overuse to prevent fatigue
Set clear guidelines on expected use of cameras
Use AI for notes and actions
Email
Primary channel for formal, documented communication – 376 billion emails are sent every day worldwide
Keep written communication concise and clear
Use plain English
AI is good for grammar checking – but write the email yourself to avoid losing the personal touch
Messaging
Great for quick responses, community engagement and broadcast announcements
Must be used carefully to avoid errors or miscommunication
AI can assist drafting but requires oversight
Face-to-face
Most effective for building trust and understanding
Deepens relationships
Body language adds a layer of understanding and communication that is impossible with digital
Make the effort to have regular in-person meetings
Lights! Action! Story!
Emotion is sacred. Facts are free
How to say it with Anthony ‘Tas’ Tasgal
T here is a theme running through my columns. It is about the need to cut through what I have termed ‘attention spam’. In the war of attention in which we are all perennially involved, storytelling should be your weapon of choice to attract, involve and retain your audience. Why does it take a story to amplify and deepen the truth? And why is a story so different from a mere catalogue of facts? Look at great movies and TV series that deal with true stories. We soon uncover some clues as to why they are so successful.
Scandals on the screen
Hollywood has a distinguished history of scandal movies. Take 2000’s Erin Brockovich, which focuses on a single mother in 1993 battling a large corporation that she knows has released dangerous chemicals into a town’s water supply. Or, in the political realm, All the President’s Men, the 1976 film based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting of the Watergate scandal. More recently, we had The Big Short, which chronicles the buildup to the financial crisis of 2007-8.
On this side of the Atlantic, the factual drama recently aired on Channel 4, Dirty Business, covered the sewage scandal of British rivers. It garnered much attention.
But the biggest social and political impact was created by 2024’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office (see Director Spring 2026, page 16). It became one of the most-watched programmes of the year and led to questions in parliament.
Why, I wondered, did it strike such a chord and cut through the fog of public inertia in a way that investigative journalism – including many articles in the press and a BBC investigation – had failed to? Unlike its documentary forebears, ITV’s drama achieved a significant dent in public consciousness as well as unprecedented political traction.
Three questions, three answers
1 Why was the drama so successful?
2 What can it tell us about the power of storytelling?
3 And what can we adapt for the world of marketing, communications and presentations?
Make people care First, because it is a textbook example of the power of a story to move and create meaning, emotion and empathy in a way that much factual and documentary communication so often fails. Documentary frequently falls into
Storytelling has one killer application: it identifies and amplifies emotions. Above all, it makes us care
the trap of being arid, clinical and rational. But storytelling has one killer application: it identifies and amplifies emotions. Above all, it makes us care. Mr Bates evoked anger, sadness and empathy –among other emotions.
In the language of behavioural economics, too much of what is purely factual addresses merely the logical, conscious mental process known as System 2 – think of most brand communications or PowerPoint presentations. Yet behavioural economics teaches us that decisions cannot be made – and influence cannot be sustained – unless unconscious, emotional System 1 is also involved. And that is where storytelling does its work powerfully, and often mysteriously.
Be human A documentary, news-driven approach often deals with injustice, fraud, intimidation, fear, persecution and obstruction at an abstract level. But a story explores issues at the human, personal but still universal level. In The Storytelling Workbook, I cite this from the ‘father of psychology’ William James:
“If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story.”
Story-shaped brains Our brains are story-shaped. They are designed to effortlessly absorb and interpret information through the medium of storytelling. In one of my favourite quotes, author Philip Pullman puts it like this:
“Thou shalt not is easily forgotten, but once upon a time lasts forever.”
So, how can we put these lessons into practice in our marketing, communications and presentations?
Top tips for telling tales
3 Personality and character Too much of our emphasis is on ‘content’ rather than form. Note: try replacing the word ‘content’ with the word ‘stuff ’. Just calling something content doesn’t make it effective. Most people spend too much time thinking about what we say and nowhere near long enough on how we say it. Great brands and comms do the ‘how’ bit effortlessly. Think of the Specsavers campaign founded on warmth, empathy and humour (then consider that it is focused – sorry! – on a serious and critical matter: our eyesight.)
4 Create conflict You can’t have a story without conflict. It’s why I disabuse many clients who tell me their website is replete with stories, when they are actually just case studies, because they lack conflict. At the heart of all great series and movies is a conflict – or several.
Tas is a trainer on storytelling, behavioural economics and insight, TEDx speaker and author of eight books – including the award-winning ‘The Storytelling Book’. His new book ‘The Art in Marketing Book’ is out now
1 Jettison the jargon Jargon – and clichés – are the bane of communication. They are the thieves of meaning. I’m talking about you, ‘passionate’, ‘solutionising’ and ‘lean and agile’: the latter should only be used to describe gymnasts.
2 Emotion and empathy Whatever your communication – newsletter, board report, presentation or brand campaign – if it doesn’t aim to elicit or trigger an emotion, you might as well not bother.
No way out
Firms are in a straitjacket of owner dependency
I
t ends with a cocktail. At least, that was the idea. Many founders have a clear plan of building a profitable business, growing it steadily, and then one day realising its value through sale, succession or investment. Their next plan is to either start another business – or retire to the beach with a Mai Tai. That’s the intention. But, barman, hold the rum. Because that is a proposal that is unlikely to transpire.
Regardless of how successful that business is, it probably fails to sell. In the UK, only one in five founders manage to complete the sale of their company. The reason, according to our research, is not weak revenue, lack of ambition or poor profitability. It is something more structural –and more common. It is owner dependence.
oversight and strategic direction all flow through one individual. Critical knowledge resides in their head. Teams defer upwards. Customers rely on personal trust rather than organisational strength.
In early-stage companies, this model is the most obvious way to run the business. Founders do everything because they must. The problem emerges as the business scales.
Companies in the £3–30 million revenue bracket are particularly exposed. They are too complex to run informally. Yet they are often too small – or too cautious – to have invested in formal management structures. The founder remains central long after the business has outgrown that model. The company appears strong. But structurally it is fragile. Too much of it is dependent on one person.
Investors and lenders hesitate to back businesses whose performance hinges on one person
Our white paper, The Owner Dependence Problem in UK SME Businesses focuses on smallto-medium-sized businesses generating between £3 million and £30 million in annual revenue. It argues that excessive reliance on founders is one of the most significant and avoidable destroyers of business value in the UK midmarket. For directors, particularly those approaching succession, investment or exit, the implications are significant.
Hidden fragility
Cash crash
The commercial consequences of ownerdependency are stark. Owner-dependent businesses typically sell at discounts of 20–40% compared to comparable companies that operate independently. For a business valued at £5 million, that may represent a £1–2 million loss of realised value. In such circumstances, earnouts become more likely. Buyers, perceiving risk, defer payment and tie consideration to future performance. Research cited in the white paper suggests founders typically receive only 70–80% of anticipated earnout value.
More concerning still is that failed sales are common. Due diligence exposes the risk of owner dependency. Transactions collapse.
Owner dependence is as it sounds – it is what occurs when a business cannot function effectively without the founder making key decisions. Day-today operations, customer relationships, financial
Yet even where the sale is not imminent, owner dependence restricts growth. Investors and lenders hesitate to back businesses whose performance hinges on one individual. For directors, this is not simply an operational issue. It is a governance and value-protection problem.
WORDS Kevin Harrington
Bad habits
The white paper is clear: owner dependence is not a moral failing. It develops through habit, psychology and structural inertia.
Founders retain key customer relationships because they built them. They hesitate to delegate major decisions because mistakes are costly. They struggle to justify £80,000–£120,000 salaries for senior hires when their own remuneration is structured around dividends. Documentation feels secondary to growth.
Gradually, the organisation forms a hub-andspoke model: all critical information and decisionmaking flow through one person. This feels natural and normal.
Managers who are unhappy with the lack of autonomy move to different companies. Owners retain managers who wait on direction, instead of leading and taking ownership.
The problems this causes are often unapparent, unless and until that one person becomes unavailable. Holidays are interrupted or only partially taken. Only serious illness exposes the fact that the business is overstretched. Overreliance on one person is a serious weakness that is unsustainable.
Owner dependence is not a moral failing. It develops through habit, psychology and inertia
Diagnose dependency
If reading this has made you question how exposed your business is to this problem, you should ask yourself:
Would operations materially slow if I were absent for three weeks?
Do major customers rely on personal relationships with me?
Are key processes undocumented?
Do my managers escalate rather than decide? Could a buyer reasonably run this business without my ongoing involvement?
If the honest answer to several of these questions is ‘yes’, dependency risk exists.
Towards owner-independence
The good news is that owner-dependence is a solvable problem. Our paper outlines four practical areas for directors to address. None are theoretical. All require deliberate effort over a realistic two-tofive-year timeframe.
1
Build management capability
An independent business requires leaders who think, not just execute.
Directors should:
Identify individuals with judgement and initiative
Gradually expand decision rights within defined boundaries
Share the reasoning behind decisions, not merely the outcomes
Invest appropriately in senior hires where capability gaps exist
Establish structured management forums (weekly or fortnightly)
Crucially, delegation must include authority, not simply tasks. Yes, mistakes will occur. But that is part of capability development.
2
Transfer customer and supplier relationships
Customer concentration around the founder is one of the most common dependency risks.
Directors should:
Introduce team members into key relationships early
Create multiple touchpoints within accounts
Document relationship history and preferences
Communicate transitions proactively and transparently
Allow 12–24 months for major relationships to embed under new ownership
There is a risk here: your customers might panic if you implement all these measures immediately. But if you execute the transition gradually – so clients are given time to know and trust other team members – you should avoid upset.
3
Document core processes
Tribal knowledge is a concealed liability.
Owners must find a way to distil the information they carry around in their heads into shared knowledge from which their colleagues or successors can benefit.
Practical steps include:
Mapping core operational processes end-to-end
Creating standard operating procedures for repeatable activities
Implementing CRM, finance and project systems that codify knowledge
Testing documentation by having staff follow it independently
Reviewing and updating procedures regularly
You must change your mindset. Reframe how you regard paperwork. Documentation is not timewasting bureaucracy. It is transferable value.
4
Establish governance and decision rights
Formal governance reduces personal bottlenecks (and should allow you to take a holiday!).
Directors should:
Define clearly which decisions are autonomous, consultative or reserved
Hold structured management reviews (weekly, monthly, quarterly)
Consider appointing a non-executive adviser for external perspective
Oversight should replace involvement.
Freedom framework
Reducing owner-dependence cannot be compressed into six months. You should begin implementing the transition five years before your planned exit. Yet if you recognise many of the problems outlined here, begin work immediately. Three years from exit, leadership structures and relationship transfers should be embedded. One year out, the business should be tested for operational independence, including periods of owner-absence. Directors who delay often discover that exit windows close faster than dependency can be unwound.
Where businesses have multiple founders, dependency grows more complex. Decisionmaking can become concentrated in a small group. Differing appetites for stepping back can create tension. Buyers require alignment. The structural work is similar in nature to that of a single founder. But it is multiplied in volume. Thus, directors in partnership structures should begin alignment conversations well before exit discussions.
white paper notes that 70% of UK businesses have never explored this protection. For directors carrying material personal risk exposure, this is a straightforward governance requirement.
Strategic sense
Reducing owner dependence is not solely about selling. It unlocks broader value in the business in many ways. These include better access to growth capital, greater viability of management buyouts and employee ownership trusts. It enables family succession planning. It permits strategic scaling without the risk of burnout. It gives you options and a life outside the business.
Reducing the dependence on yourself should be a liberating, attractive prospect. Yet perhaps the most difficult barrier is psychological. Founder identity is often entwined with control. For too many founders, stepping back feels like accepting diminishing relevance. This is the wrong frame. Owners should perceive it instead as their moving from operator to architect.
The shift from working in the business to working on the business is not passive. It is strategic. It demands conscious governance design, capability investment and cultural evolution.
Remember that dependence is predictable, measurable – and preventable. Founders who fail to address it may face discounted valuations, protracted earnouts, restricted growth capital, continued personal overwork and stress. Ultimately, they may end up like 80% of other business owners – and fail to sell at all.
That is a grim prospect. Firms that rely on one or few individuals are doomed by demographic reality to fail eventually. Yet those who address the problem systematically create resilient, transferable enterprises.
While dependency is being reduced, temporary risk mitigation measures, such as key person insurance, should be considered. The Kevin Harrington is a partner at Exit Factor
That Mai Tai is on ice. The beach is waiting. The best time to plan your escape was five years ago. The second-best time is now.
GO DEEPER White paper The Owner Dependence Problem in UK SME Businesses is available free to download from
Risky business
Leaders must grow wise to a world they have never known
“ We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured…” This statement could easily be attributed to Winston Churchill and dismissed as historical commentary. Yet this is not a quote from the last century, but December 2025. Like Churchill, Nato secretary general Mark Rutte rarely minces his words.
Company leaders have been warned, and are taking note. A Deloitte survey released in January highlighted that UK chief financial officers are becoming more aware of geopolitical risk. They are wise to do so. The analysis highlighted that “geopolitics remains the top external risk for finance chiefs of large UK businesses heading into 2026”. This increased geopolitical volatility has significant implications for directors.
Recent changes to the UK Corporate Governance Code (CGC) means organisations
words Roger Dennis illustration Tom Goyon
listed in the commercial companies (ESCC) category are now legally obligated to report on a range of non-financial risks.
To elaborate, the updated code contains two key sections: provisions 28 and 29. Together, these two clauses require that the board carries out a robust assessment of the company’s emerging and principal risks.
In addition, the board should include in its annual report a description of its principal risks – and an explanation of how these are being managed or mitigated. Furthermore, the board should explain what procedures are in place to identify and manage emerging risks.
The Code notes that ‘principal risks’ “should include, but are not necessarily limited to, those that could result in events or circumstances that might threaten the company’s business model, future performance, solvency or liquidity and reputation”
Increased geopolitical volatility – or even war in Europe – would quickly threaten business models and impact future performance.
Sir Anthony Finkelstein is a director of Barclays Execution Services. He says that boards are increasingly expected to understand how macroscale geopolitical change can affect business models, supply chains and operating assumptions. Finkelstein adds that the revised Corporate Governance Code reinforces that expectation through its emphasis on emerging risk and internal control effectiveness.
So how can directors ensure companies adequately monitor external principal risks in compliance with the new regulations?
Get above strategy
Boards need to know whether the company strategy development process expressly accounts
Four futures
Scenarios are not forecasts. They are narratives that can be used to start difficult and challenging conversations with leaders. Often the future emerges in the ‘messy middle’ between different scenarios.
Oxford University’s Heywood Fellowship has published a set of four scenarios for the global economic order in 2040. The full scenarios can be found online. My analyses of the four narratives are featured here.
Empty chair
The US has stepped back from global economic leadership and no other global economic hegemon has emerged to take its place. China has been asserting more influence in line with its interests.
Possible business implications: how do multinational organisations operate in a world where global institutions no longer have any power, when the US dollar is no longer the global reserve currency and there’s no cooperation from the US on addressing climate change?
Two tribes
There is great contestation between the two major powers
for global, macroscale issues. Having a broad understanding of key trends such as demographics, climate change, AI, geopolitics and democracy will prompt more robust strategic responses.
This process can be characterised as getting ‘above strategy’. In other words, how do organisations anticipate and prepare, rather than be surprised and reactive? Management needs to develop a robust view of macroscale issues, before considering subsequent choices and trade-offs.
There’s a simple litmus test you can apply to management assurances in this regard. If your head of strategy tells the board that they have this process under control, consider whether they were working at the strategic level in the late 1960s?
Leaders in the late 1960s said that it felt like the world was on re
the US and China. Meanwhile, there is growing economic nationalism and a shift to ‘strategic national capitalism’ in many countries. Populism is popular. Economic policy outcomes are volatile.
Possible business implications: in a world where nation-state economic coercion is rife, how do organisations build new levels of agility and anticipation into their culture to access new markets at speed? What must companies do to pivot across the two dominant currencies and with systemic fragmentation of global networks and markets?
Chusa chums
The US and China have remained in competition. But –over time – the great powers have found a pathway to cooperate. The US has seen managed competition as a route to retain advantage. China has prioritised stability and domestic growth over global competition. The US has sought to reshape the global economic order, but with a more enlightened partnership approach.
Possible business implications: this is the least challenging scenario. It outlines a balanced path where the ‘G2’ (US and China) dominates the world. Yet it remains the least likely scenario to emerge.
Revenge of the nerds
That era is the most recent parallel to the current levels of global volatility. Leaders in the late 1960s said that it felt like the world was on fire. There has been no analogue since. Thus, any executive younger than 85 won’t have had skin in the game the last time the world was so unstable.
Almost nobody in leadership positions today has experienced an environment equivalent to what the world is experiencing now. So, in the absence of experience with extreme geopolitical volatility, what are the practical steps organisations can implement to get above strategy?
The capability calculus
Sir Anthony notes that geopolitical instability demands adaptive, system-aware governance. He adds that this cannot be undertaken without disciplined scenario-thinking and institutional foresight capability.
The concentration of economic power in a few global technology firms – based in the US and China – has remade the global economic order. Dominant technology companies in the US have issued their own stablecoins and encouraged their widespread use as means of payment.
Possible business implications: what happens to business operations and access to markets when firms must choose between US and Chinese technology stacks across markets? How do leaders deal with multiple competing non-state financial standards and currencies?
Directors should consider what capabilities are required to build a robust view of global conditions. Does the strategy team have expertise in selecting – then analysing – critical, external, massive global datasets? Can it develop robust scenarios that leverage data and resonate with directors? Does the strategy team run wargaming exercises that leverage these scenarios?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, then your ability to develop a strategic response to global volatility is handicapped from the outset.
The capabilities referenced above are often found in corporate foresight teams. A prime example is energy giant Shell’s Scenarios programme. Hiring someone that has experience
Debugged: The case of the pandemic programmers
In 2015, I led a small team that spent four months analysing the impact of a future global pandemic. The project quickly focused on global supply chains as the biggest issue arising from this type of disease. Highly attuned to the weak signals that would indicate the emergence of a global pandemic, in January 2020, I worked with clients to help them get ahead of a possible worldwide crisis. One of my clients was a digital agency. It spent a fortnight analysing digital pandemic mitigation processes before most leaders realised that Covid was about to turn the world upside down. That work led to an app that was used in New Zealand to track the spread of Covid. The app subsequently powered two years of global growth for the company at a time when competitors were caught by surprise and struggled with the global slowdown.
in one of these teams will significantly accelerate capability development. Directors should engage the entire management team and other key stakeholders so that they also understand the need for new capabilities.
The process protocol
Remember that the CGC states the “board should explain what procedures are in place to identify and manage emerging risks.”
It is insufficient for directors to merely assert confidence in their strategy team. The organisation must show in its annual report how it has monitored and reviewed internal controls.
Having clear processes has another benefit – it introduces a necessary level of rigour to corporate foresight teams. Like many highly specialist professions, foresight experts love jargon. Many hide behind it. Directors must mandate that procedures are described in plain – easily explainable – language.
Reviews and routines
The updated CGC requires that the board should monitor the company’s risk management and internal control framework and, at least annually, carry out a review of its effectiveness.
The need for routines reinforces one of the key foundations of a robust strategic response to volatility. Regular updates and inputs to the strategy process reduce the chance of being blindsided by events that were not anticipated.
stage is to set up routines. Consistent and timely refreshes should trigger updates to the strategy process.
This is important because, in the current operating environment, three-year strategy cycles are almost out of date before the virtual ink has dried.
Directors should also establish routines to learn from experience and identify cognitive ‘blind spots’ where risks and opportunities were missed previously.
Opportunity in regulation
Some directors may be frustrated at more regulatory overheads. Yet the new code should be viewed as an opportunity. A board can use the introduction of the new regulation to move beyond mere compliance and initiate a more robust strategy process.
One of the key outcomes should be a leadership team that is anticipatory rather than reactive. The strategy team should not only be more adept at mitigating risk – it should also be able to seize opportunities.
Recent business history is peppered with examples of organisations that leveraged a crisis – consider, for example, the stratospheric rise of Zoom during the pandemic.
Identifying and leveraging opportunity is an important function. It is human nature to focus on risk. But turbulence also creates opportunity. Directors should actively consider how to thrive in volatility.
In other words, once an organisation has capabilities and processes established, the next Roger Dennis is founder of Dennis & Partners
UK Corporate Governance Code
GO DEEPER
The Four Geo Scenarios
Brian Reid CDir CEO, Deli Lites
Good directors never stop learning.
Brian Reid, Chief Executive of Deli Lites Ireland, became a Chartered Director in 2025. “I’ve learned a lot about myself as a director and my responsibilities. The IoD has helped me understand the difference between an executive and a nonexecutive director, how to form the right board around me, and how to think more about the longer-term business objectives.”
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Book club
Director’s top picks
The space between
Kerry-Lyn Stanton-Downes completes the story Dale Carnegie tried to tell
I picked up Beyond Words expecting a light read on human behaviour. What I got instead was formative.
I found myself rethinking not just how I lead, but why certain periods of my career had been so challenging. Why interactions, projects and relationships failed. The answer, as Kerry-Lyn Stanton-Downes makes compellingly clear, is that it wasn’t because of the business strategy, the organisational structure or the individual performance. It was a lack of understanding about how to pay attention to the way people relate: something I had no idea about, nor the language or framework to recognise.
Beyond Words offers both the language and framework. At its core is a deceptively simple premise: we do not just have a mental health
epidemic in our organisations. We have a relational poverty epidemic – a systemic erosion of the space between people that no individual intervention will fix.
It is a bold claim, but Stanton-Downes backs it with neuroscience, 25 years of clinical and consulting work, and a framework – the Eight Principles of Relational Capacity – that is both rigorous and immediately applicable.
What sets this book apart from the crowded leadership shelf is that it does not stay theoretical. Each principle comes with what Stanton-Downes calls ‘Start With This’ – practical actions that can be applied in the next conversation, the next meeting, the next difficult moment.
As a revenue leader, I am always looking for insight I can use in the same week that
I read it. This book delivered that from the first chapter.
The personal stories are what make the ideas stick. Real people in real situations – co-founders who cannot hear each other; teams that look functional, but really are falling apart; leaders doing everything ‘right’ and still losing their best people. These are not hypothetical. They are the situations every senior leader recognises, but rarely has the language to address.
One comparison surprised me. I have read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People several times. I now consider it half the story. Carnegie tells you how to connect. StantonDownes explains what is actually happening when
What I have been able to do since reading this book has been remarkable
connection works – and more importantly, what to do when it breaks down. That second half has been missing from every leadership book I have read, until now.
What I have been able to do in the weeks since reading this book – with my team, my clients, even with my own children – has been genuinely remarkable. I understand who I am with better clarity, and I understand the people around me differently. Not because I learned a technique, but because something shifted in how I see what is happening between us.
If you lead people, this book will change how you do it.
Alan Crean is the director and head of account management of BusinessOptix
Beyond Words: How to Lead People from Survival to Success
Kerry-Lyn Stanton-Downes
LID Publishing
Twilight robbery
Cybercrime is everywhere. Make sure your company isn’t next
Anja Shortland is professor of political economy at King’s College London – and a world expert on the economics of crime. In this eminently readable book, she looks at the dark economy of hacking and ransomware. Cybercrime is a multibillion-pound industry run by wily hackers and fraudsters. They bankrupt businesses, stall governments and steal sensitive data in return for ransoms, which they may or may not honour through the delivery of remedies such as decryption keys.
In a 2024 survey, more than half the enterprises in the Americas, Europe and Asia with turnover over $10 million had experienced a ransomware attack in the previous year. Some 63% faced ransom demands exceeding $1 million. The average payment was $2 million. Gangs have taken around $1 billion since 2020. Paying a ransom does not, however, guarantee safety. Attackers may have left themselves a backdoor into the system for future attack. The victim is essentially relying on a code of honour among thieves.
The book covers a complete history from 1989 to 2013 – when proper ransomware was unleashed on the private sector. From 2020, governments finally became more involved in what is now an epidemic, with the beginnings of a concerted fightback now emerging.
It all began around 1963 when hackers used their skills to make free phone calls. In the mid-
Cybercrime victims essentially rely on a code of honour among thieves
1980s, an analogy was drawn between computing and Aids research to explain how digital data flows and the trust issues that come with it. By the 1990s, the term ‘cryptovirology’ was being used to describe how viruses could be used to extort money.
Many systems could be hacked through a form of social engineering – befriending an employee so they unwittingly give away access details. In this respect, cybercrime often has an offline dimension. It is the shadowy twin of the tech elite, with the hacking community split down the middle. IT professionals and illicit hackers are cut from the same cloth.
Perhaps surprisingly to the layperson, many gangs follow modern business models to run their operations. Software-as-a service is particularly popular. Cybercriminals frequently interact in a very helpful way to make sure their victims are guided through the processes needed to decrypt their data and pay the ransom. Meanwhile, insurers and governments have been at loggerheads over who should bear the cost of so-called ‘ransom war’, with some arguing that a ransom attack is tantamount to an act of war and should therefore be treated as such in insurance terms.
This is a highly informative review of the murky world of cybercrime and will be of great interest to those of us who know little about it.
Kevin Duncan is an author, business expert and owner of expertadviceonline.com
We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware by
Anja Shortland Pro�ile Books
Machine learning
Robotic is the essential modern language
T his book lands at exactly the right moment. Senior leaders are being asked, often implicitly, to engage with technologies that are already reshaping work, decision-making and even relationships. Yet most are doing so without a clear idea of what these systems are. This book fills that gap with clarity, thoughtfulness – and a welcome absence of hype.
Jamie Bartlett writes as someone who understands the realities of modern work. He neither evangelises nor dismisses AI. Instead, he takes a measured view of both its extraordinary
Director classics ~ Timeless
The 2020 Board: The Future of Company Boards By
2016
Pedro Nueno LID Publishing,
After years of stagnation, boards of directors are once again becoming serious instruments for company management.
Legislative changes, increases in directors’ responsibility and modifications in company environments demand a serious reassessment of company governance. Boards need to move to a higher level of professionalisation to guarantee the fulfilment of their duties.
Core aspects of boards –organisation, composition, duration and remuneration – should be deeply reviewed. Using humour and real cases, the book charts the process of improvement for boards of directors.
potential and its limitations. The result is a guide that feels grounded and trustworthy. It explains how we got here, cuts through the jargon, and offers a sense of where things may be heading, all without overwhelming the lay reader.
What makes the book particularly valuable is its practicality. This is neither a technical manual nor a superficial ‘prompting guide’. It is a set of habits and disciplines for working with AI. Bartlett shows, for example, how much better results become when you provide context, ask sharper questions, give examples and iterate. He encourages readers to check their own biases, be precise in their language, and remain alert to what he calls the systems’ ‘sycophancy’. Most importantly, he offers a simple but powerful discipline: assume the system may be wrong – and check accordingly. He is also refreshingly clear about AI’s deficiencies. These systems can ‘hallucinate’, confidently producing answers that are incomplete, misleading or simply untrue. Bartlett
does not treat this as a minor quirk, but as a central leadership issue. He explains why it happens and, crucially, what to do about it. Trust, but verify, and build that discipline into how you and your organisation use these tools. Alongside this, the book brings to life what AI can actually do. Bartlett’s description of these systems as engines of remixing and analogy is particularly striking. By modelling vast amounts of human knowledge and language, they are constantly making connections that we might overlook. That creates genuine opportunities for creativity and innovation. At the same time, he addresses the anxieties many leaders feel, especially about job displacement and the erosion of entry-level pathways, in a measured tone.
The book’s scope is another strength. From the rise of large language models to creativity, work, style shifting – and even questions such as the consequences of poor prompts, Bartlett covers a thought-provoking range of issues. You come away better informed about how best to use AI.
reading on being an effective board member
The Strategy Book: How To Think and Act Strategically To Deliver Outstanding Results
By Max McKeown FT Publishing International, 2024
Strategy is all about shaping the future, and that requires a combination of thinking, planning and reacting to events that emerge along the way. The crucial questions are: What do we want to do? What do we think is possible? What do we need to do to achieve our goals? When should we react to new opportunities and adapt plans?
Thinking before you plan is vital. Strategists who don’t take time to think are just planners. Inspiration and insight can be drawn from looking forward, backwards and outwards, blending smart prediction with astute observation of what’s happening outside the company or category.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
By Greg McKeown Virgin Books, 2014
The disciplined pursuit of less is a systematic discipline applicable every time you are faced with a decision. By applying selective criteria to what is truly essential, we regain control of choices to make the best possible contribution to things that really matter. The core of the approach is less but better
Essentialists devote their energy only to one or two carefully selected tasks. “Significant progress in what matters most” beats “a millimetre of progress in a million directions”. It involves discerning the “unimportance of practically everything” – and is ideal for anyone who has too much to do, particularly leaders.
There is also a subtle thread running through the book: the importance of understanding ourselves. As AI becomes more conversational, persuasive and personalised, the risk is not just technical error but misplaced trust. The idea of a ‘therapist in your pocket’ is both compelling and cautionary. The closing section, ‘Ten Habits for Talking to AI Without Losing Control’, is worth the price of the book alone. Clear, practical and immediately applicable, it offers a disciplined way forward.
For directors and senior leaders, this is not just an interesting read. It is a necessary one.
Jeremy Kourdi is a business author and coach
Rebel Ideas: The Power of Thinking Differently
By Matthew Syed John Murray, 2021
Collective blindness occurs when everyone thinks the same – a phenomenon often called an echo chamber. Rebels think differently from clones, and constructive dissent leads to more intelligent innovation. A team of intelligent rebels fair well so long as they overlap a little, discuss things robustly, and pool perspectives that are germane and synergistic. They do not agree for the sake of it. They challenge, augment, diverge and cross-pollinate. Diverse groups of problem-solvers consistently outperform groups of the best and the brightest.
Kevin Duncan is an author and founder of TheBusiness500.com which offers summaries of business books
How to Talk to AI (And How Not To) by Jamie Bartlett WH Allen
Better decisions are possible
Love,
Logic and Law work best in concert
The Corporate Philosopher with Roger Steare
Why do boards make bad decisions? It is rarely because directors are unintelligent. More often than not, they are busy, overloaded, overconfident, badly briefed, politically constrained or trapped in a culture where awkward questions are quietly unwelcome.
Add time pressure, competing interests and the performative theatre of governance, and it becomes remarkably easy for intelligent people to make poor decisions together.
I have spent much of the last 25 years working with leaders in precisely these conditions. What I have learned is simple. Better board decisions never begin with more process. They begin with better judgement. Better judgement depends on a framework that people can easily remember and use when the pressure is on.
That framework is Love, Logic and Law These are simple words, but they describe three deep human capacities.
Love asks the first and most important question: who will be helped and who may be harmed? It asks us to care, not sentimentally but seriously. It convenes those usually absent from the boardroom: customers, colleagues, suppliers, communities and future generations.
Logic asks whether we are thinking clearly. What do we know? What don’t we know? What assumptions are we making? Logic disciplines instinct. It tests evidence. It forces us to examine whether a decision is merely attractive –or wise.
Ethics is not a department. It is the core discipline of decisionmaking for all of us
Law asks about rules, duties, promises and justice. Is it lawful? Is it fair? Are we keeping faith with the standards we claim to uphold? Boards are at their weakest when they reduce ethics to legality. ‘Can we?’ is not the same question as, ‘Should we?’
The best decisions come when all three are heard together. Love without Logic can become impulsive and partial. Logic without Love can become cold and inhuman. Law without either can collapse into box-ticking. Every board I know has a default bias towards one of these. The work is to notice that bias and correct it.
Space for challenge
Joe Garner used this approach as chief executive at HSBC UK, BT Openreach and Nationwide Building Society. Garner understood that good leadership depends on asking better questions, hearing unwelcome truths and resisting the temptation to confuse authority with wisdom. He created space for challenge. He knew that trust is built when people can see, not only what decision has been made, but how and why it was made.
At HSBC UK, in the long aftermath of the financial crisis, that mattered because trust had been broken and could not be restored by rhetoric alone. At Openreach, it mattered because infrastructure decisions affect millions of lives in both practical and invisible ways. At Nationwide, it mattered because a mutual should – at its best –balance performance with stewardship, prudence with humanity; and member value with trust. Different sectors. Different pressures. Same human challenge: how do we decide what’s right when the stakes are high and the answers are not obvious?
Force for good
This is why my work as a commissioner on the IoD’s Business: A Force for Good? commission feels so timely.
Business as a force for good is an phrase. But unless it changes the quality decisions, it risks becoming little more well-meaning branding.
A purpose statement is not proof
The proof lies in what boards actually do when there is real money at stake, pressure, and real risk to reputation.
That is where governance becomes just managerial.
If boards want business to be a good, they need to move beyond the old habit of treating ethics as a side discussion delegated to compliance, HR, legal or sustainability.
Ethics is not a department. It is the core discipline of decision-making for all of us, especially under conditions uncertainty, power and consequence.
In other words, the question is a board has values printed on the question is whether those values are boardroom when the choices are difficult.
Better questions
So what does this mean in practice? boards should ask better questions, Not just: is it legal? But also: is what will this cost? But also: who will cost? Not just: what is the upside? could go wrong, and for whom? Not defend this decision? But also: would to explain it publicly, plainly and without
These are not soft questions. They edged governance questions. They risk management because they widen of vision. They improve culture because they legitimise honest challenge. And they improve performance because trust, once lost, is expensive to rebuild.
Too many boards still over-rely on one or two voices. Some lean heavily on Law. They become cautious, procedural and comforted by compliance, even as trust ebbs away.
Some lean heavily on Logic. They optimise and model – but fail to see the human consequences until it is too late.
Some speak warmly of Love in their values and branding, but lack the discipline to translate care into difficult, sometimes costly decisions.
A better board does not choose between Love, Logic and Law. It learns how to hold them in tension.
The real work of the board
Directors do not need more slogans. They need a shared language for wise judgement. They need chairpersons that welcome respectful dissent.
They need non-executives who are willing to challenge the obvious.
And they need executive teams who understand that the quality of a decision is not measured only by quarterly results, but by whether it deserves the trust on which all sustainable performance depends.
Better board decisions are not a luxury. They are the foundation of any serious claim that business can be a force for good. of board than choose real market of whether wall. The visible in the it right? just: hardimprove the field
Professor Roger Steare is an educator, speaker and author
The real work of boards is not simply to approve, note, monitor and assure. It is to exercise judgement on behalf of people who are affected by decisions and are rarely present when those decisions are made.
Former HSBC chief executive Joe Garner shows how he used Love, Logic and Law in decision-making
GO DEEPER
Tomorrow’s director with Vivan Shridharani
Pivotal decision
Switching the focus of his business paid off for Vivan Shridharani
T
wo of my passions as a child were football and tennis I aspired to pursue a career in sport. But I always had the bug for venturing out on my own because both my parents had left the corporate world to start their own businesses.
I was always attracted to the tech sector I could see firsthand how it was changing the world in which we lived. It was at university when I first seriously considered entrepreneurship. One of my earliest projects was working with a local manufacturing business which logged all its data in manual registers, but never used it to improve their business model. By failing to harness the data, the business was unable to reach its potential.
I noticed that there was a growth in people wanting to work for themselves I initially set up Raindrop in 2020 with my fellow founders to offer a self-invested personal pension (Sipp) to support self-employed workers who were excluded from auto-enrolment. While offering the Sipp, we realised that many customers had lost their old pensions and struggled to track them down. We pivoted our offering to launch a pension-finding service, and have since partnered with some of the UK’s largest pension-providers to help customers trace old pots. Since launch, Raindrop’s technology has recovered over £1 billion from more than 103,000 pension pots.
Remaining open-minded even as your business scales is vital This may require guidance and support from mentors or colleagues in your network. Being open to accepting the knowledge of others when needed can be hugely beneficial.
A firm’s wider team is more important than its founders It’s my job to ensure that our people have the tools and environment to excel. When we achieve this, growth follows.
As a founder, resilience is the most important skill It’s inevitable there will be frustrating days
and setbacks, and when this happens, founders need to move on quickly. Of course, it’s just as important to celebrate the successes too.
Don’t underestimate the importance of collaboration The financial services sector, in particular, has seen rapid technological advancements over recent years, from AI to real-time payments, and it is often harder for larger companies to adapt quickly to this shifting landscape. This is where partnerships with entrepreneur-led fintechs become essential. Their smaller and more agile nature means they can develop innovations quicker to keep pace with change.
Vivan Shridharani is co-founder & chief commercial officer at Raindrop
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