Can Busy Board Directors Afford Guessing Data?

And so, the lyrics goes in Pink Floyd’s eternal song Time: “And you are young, and life is long, and there is time to kill today…And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.” How many board directors and senior executives wish if there were more than 24 hours a day? They are too many to be counted.  

Your board meetings are running long and happening several times for each board every year, let alone the time needed to prepare for them. Add to that, the countless hours spent in video and phone calls with members of the various board committees. Remember the last meeting of the usually burdened audit committee?  

Following all the meetings comes the emails and WhatsApp messages with your team and network of investors, executives as well as potential partners to grow the business. You also must find time for some personal work like prioritising tasks, strategizing, reviewing existing plans and last but not least reading depth and update-me newsletters and press reports. And of course, don’t forget spending quality time with your family and do your daily workout.   

Busy, right? If you know when to run and are keen on not missing the starting gun in every board you attend, you need to have clear insights to set, evaluate and monitor the daily, monthly, or yearly goals of the multiple boards you sit on thanks to your human capital, chiefly reputation, experience, and skills. But they aren’t surely enough. Can you afford guessing data or plucking a key figure out of the air because you didn’t have enough time to prepare before a board?  

Although holding multiple directorships is a sign of an experienced and knowledgeable board member, busy directors may not be able to fully use these skills without trusted data that sums up the key sectors in business and economics.  

In Argaam, we provide busy directors and executives with a key source of certainty through well-mined and professionally structured accurate, complete, and up-to-date data that plays a significant role in firm performance. It helps corporate decision-makers to make decisions confidently. In other words, and simply speaking, Argaam’s team transforms the abundance of data that comes in day in day out into usable and useful information.  

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The aim is to help busy directors improve strategic decision-making by giving them a more holistic view of key sectors ranging from petrochemicals and banking to real estate and telecom. In a nutshell, it’s a heavy-duty analytics job and a crucial service in a complex world, so that a busy and overwhelmed director can be well-informed.  

Supported by the right data and access to a pool of knowledge provided by Arqaam from a wide array of firms and sectors, experienced, well-networked and reputable directors possess specific skills and expertise as prerequisites for these positions based on the ‘reputation hypothesis’ in related academic research.  

In today’s world, more talented and reputable directors and CEOs are more likely to hold multiple directorships. Around 65% of S&P 500 directors sit on at least one other board, while one in ten sits on at least three, according to the UK-based consultancy PwC in a recent survey.  

Just to mention but a few examples of senior executives juggling several board positions at the time: Mary Barra is General Motors’ CEO -- the first woman to lead one of the big three automakers in the US -- sits on at least three boards: GM, the Walt Disney Company, and the Business Roundtable, which’s collection of America's most powerful corporate CEOs.  

Apple CEO Tim Cook sits on the boards of directors of Apple, Nike, and the National Football Foundation. AIRBUS CEO Guillaume Faury is a member of the board of directors of AIRBUS, the insurance company AXA SA and the President of the French Aerospace Industries Association and President of the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD).   

In the US, the National Association of Corporate Directors suggests that directors with full-time positions should not serve on more than three or four other boards. The Business Roundtable by contrast believes that limits on the number of directorships are ill-advised.  

In a study titled ‘Too Busy to Mind the Business? Monitoring by Directors with Multiple Board Appointments’, published by the Journal of the American Finance Association, researchers found that knowledgeable directors who serve larger firms and sit on larger boards are more likely to attract additional directorships. They also find that firm performance has a positive effect on the number of board seats subsequently held by a director. It’s true then if we say – ‘healthy data, healthy mind’. 

Islam Zween, "Argaam" CEO