Boards Made Simple

Someone just asked you to join a board. Or you’re building one. Or you’ve served for years and quietly wondered whether you’re doing it right. This book is for you.

Boards Made Simple explains, in plain language, how to set up a board, run it and serve on it well. It covers both kinds of boards most people meet: nonprofit boards and corporate boards. Throughout the book, side-by-side comparisons show what’s the same and what’s different, so you know which rules apply to you.

You’ll learn how to:

• Tell governance apart from management, and stay on the right side of the line
• Understand your legal duties, conflicts of interest and personal liability
• Build a board from scratch: legal structure, bylaws, size and first directors
• Recruit the right people with a skills matrix, and onboard them well
• Define the roles of the chair, treasurer, secretary and CEO
• Set up committees that work, from audit to governance
• Run meetings that focus on strategy, with consent agendas and in-camera sessions
• Read financial statements, oversee the audit and spot red flags
• Hire, evaluate, pay and, when necessary, replace the CEO
• Build a healthy board culture and evaluate the board itself

Two complete step-by-step guides

Strategic Planning, Step by Step: ten steps from a blank page to a risk-informed plan, including a pre-mortem, risk heat map, priority setting, goals and measures, and a one-page dashboard.

Succession Planning, Step by Step

Real board stories