Two topics here – how to get Boards focused on science and technology for the long term, and how good ideas can get … um … discovered?
Innovation, transformation, and anything that requires a longterm investment with no guarantee of when it will pay off can be easy for management teams to ignore. After all, if I have a five-year timeframe until success can be reached and my personal tenure is, say, three years, what’s the point (for me personally). This is one of the core problems of managing organizations for the long term – personal incentives are often not aligned with what the organization requires for those time horizons.
My colleague and collaborator Ryan McManus introduced a special Board committee for science and technology at Nortech, a company whose board he sits on to tremendous success. With that result, Ryan and his colleague, Amanda Maggiore, set out to see if the Nortech example was a one off, or if a pattern could be established of a relationship between firm performance and the existence of a special committee at the Board level to make sure the future had a seat at the table.
Whether this is a coincidence or not I will leave to you, dear readers. But a 2022 McKinsey study reports that “The most clearly defined form of board engagement with technology is a board committee dedicated to understanding and supporting the organization’s technology strategy, investments, and risk profile and to sharing its insights with the full board.” Further, “Our research shows that, in 2020 and 2021, companies in these industries that had a board tech committee had operating margins 100–600 basis points higher than their peers that did not have tech committees.”
Super exciting for us – we ’ re bringing our first customers on board with our SparcHub software, which was designed to make implement discovery driven growth practices easier for your organization. Reach out if you’d like a demo we ’ re getting good feedback on its usefulness.
