How the Balanced Scorecard in Cloud Concinnity® Makes Your Board Better

Socrates famously advises us that the unexamined life is not worth living. 

We would add that the unexamined boardroom will not be worth much for long!

Measurement and data continue to be critical to business growth, yet the Harvard Business Review recently found that most boardroom evaluations are inadequate, and that those poor evaluation processes are often at the root of many common boardroom complaints. 

We recognize that there is a direct line from boardroom awareness and performance measurement to the growth & health of the business itself. It’s why we created a way to bring together key company metrics, boardroom performance visibility, and simple self-measurement capabilities so that board directors and all boardroom stakeholders can understand performance anytime, at a glance. 

We call it the balanced board scorecard.

Here’s why it makes Cloud Concinnity® a next-level software.

Visibility

Imagine nothing forgotten and everything measured. We think that should be the way things work, giving every board director visibility into all critical information on a single screen. We begin with things like a business milestone & highlight summary showing progress since the previous board meeting, then add on a financial status update chart and a brief overview of industry changes to keep track of. Combined with team engagement tracking and a personal task summary, this screen means you get the lay of the land within a minute or two of logging in every time. Nothing forgotten, everything measured.

Accountability

As HBR found in their survey, one of the biggest challenges for any board of directors is self-evaluation. After being largely ignored for decades, board evaluation and measurement has often been outsourced to consultants in recent years — often under the auspices of objectivity. But the wrong outside expert can lack the nuanced understanding and context required to make anything more than general suggestions for improved board performance. The truth is, boards benefit from taking a hard look at themselves and building intelligent, ongoing self-evaluation into their plans. 

The board scorecard contains an elegant process for doing that by quantifying & reinforcing board and leadership engagement, along with a way to track risk management, strategy, and company performance. Built-in 360° evaluations mean the board can manage and evaluate itself, laying important groundwork for transparency & accountability. 

Connectivity

Finally, bringing together the self-awareness of the single screen overview and the self-evaluation of the board scorecard means all boardroom stakeholders will increase connectivity, building the foundation for ongoing collaboration. Scorecard blocks are fully customizable so you can configure by priority and determine access with role-based permissions. As with other parts of Cloud Concinnity®, the goal is not to create busywork but to streamline processes between meetings and create a more agile, nimble group of board directors who can be proactive in the good times and responsive in a crisis. 

Interactive, real time evaluations of each other mean that all boardroom stakeholders can safely and securely weigh in on the state of the board without being sabotaged by the time-pressures and interpersonal dynamics at the meeting itself. This enables real time course correction throughout the quarterly board meeting cycle, and provides the legal team a secure environment with everything they need to prove compliance that is up to date and ready anytime.

Together, increased visibility, accountability and connectivity mean a boardroom that is always improving and ready for anything. In a business world where chaos is often the new normal, this is exactly the kind of agile tool that keeps boards ready to take action at any point in the cycle.

Why We Build Best Practices Into the DNA of Cloud Concinnity®

We believe that best practices are the backbone of truly great board work, and essential for agile leadership. They distill the most effective thinking and methodology into actionable insights, making anyone who applies their wisdom better at what they do. Indeed, what business can afford anything but best practices driven action amidst the chaos and confusion that characterizes the modern business era? 

When we looked around at the current generation of board portals, we couldn’t believe how little attention was paid to industry best practices. Maybe it’s because our founding team has well over 100 years of collective C-level and boardroom experience, so we are used to thinking in terms of best practices. Maybe it’s because our CEO literally wrote the book on the high performing boardroom so they are part of every conversation we have. Or maybe it’s just a natural outcome of focusing on our mission of providing new tools and playbooks to enable boards and c-suites to be agile in the face of the disruption and chaos that defines today’s business environment. 

Focusing on best practices makes our software better. Where board books & the current generation of board portals are basic tools that can help, we go the extra mile to craft intelligent software that never stops making the people using our software effortlessly better at what they do.

Here’s how.

1. We Begin with The End In Mind

Cloud Concinnity® is built around the interactions that leaders need to do great work, combining role-based document access with our next-level interaction functionality. All too often we see boards stumble over the challenges of communication and information access, when empowering stakeholders to do their part smoothly & efficiently as part of the larger whole should be table stakes. Because we prioritize fully informed decisions, we treat access to information and the smooth integration of that information into communication as a foundational best practice. 

We know that deep, broad, and integrated communication can be difficult to curate in the boardroom, so we build the best practices it takes into how our software function. Because different people need different levels of access to different types of information, we crafted a role-based information system that allows granular permissions. Because we know how important it is for everyone to stay on the same page every step of the way, we created a robust system of automated workflows & communication tools so everyone can work securely & up-to-date anytime, anywhere, on any device. Indeed, everything leaders need to make fully informed decisions is built in.

2. We Feature As-You-Go Guidance

We know that boardroom stakeholders — whether directors, company leadership, or private investors — are busy people. That’s why we build industry best practices into the DNA of our tool. Instead of having to hunt for the newest, best ways of doing things across a range of disciplines like finance, HR and compliance, we do the hunting and build the answers into the code of our software. When there is cutting-edge thinking on a process or challenge, we’ll tell you about it. When there is a better way to do a task or a series of tasks, we’ll show you how.

In practice, this means that when you log into Cloud Concinnity®, you’ll see suggestions from our founding team pop up alongside tasks, offering guidance on how to approach the type of tasks on your plate. You’ll find a smart library full of white papers and research that curate the best thinking out there so you will always be sharpening the spear. And you’ll find pre-built workflows for things like making new board director hires and preparing for compliance audits that lay out all the necessary steps for you so that nothing falls through the cracks. 

It’s because we think of best practices and better processes as integral to powerful, agile board work. They are not nice to have things that get tacked on when you have the time — they are integral parts of doing great work for your company.

3. We Architect Meaningful Feedback

The era of decisions without measurement is over. Without understanding outcomes and peer feedback, how can we know what’s working and how to improve? Decisions must be based on data. This kind of best practice is a challenge to build into the work of remote teams where a diverse set of stakeholders is typically on asynchronous schedules, and at the same time it is the only way to find that next level of high performance. 

We build meaningful feedback into Cloud Concinnity® in two main ways: a robust dashboard to reflect company performance and a 360° feedback tool. The dashboard means that key company metrics are available at a glance for every leadership stakeholder who logs in. Keeping tabs over time rather than simply checking in a few times a year allows for better communication and risk management, not to mention a valuable foundation for strategic vision. Our proprietary board scorecard is the first of its kind to eliminate the need for outside evaluation, opting instead to give the power to the board itself, encouraging honest and ongoing feedback based on agreed-upon metrics and objectives. Whatever initial discomfort may come along with the shift will soon give way to streamlined communication and team effectiveness. 

With evolving best practices at the core of what we do, we are committed to giving you software that empowers better decisions and agile leadership, and growing along with your team as those best practices change over time. 



How Automated Workflows Transform Board Work into Agile Leadership

We define agile leadership as choosing to operate as a proactive, adaptive leader in a changing world. For many of us, that is the opposite of how we would define the experience of board work. For decades, board work has revolved around the recurring but episodic march of the board book and the board meeting. In between, there was little to do for board directors but wait for the next meeting. 

Behind the scenes, board secretaries, committee chairs and administrative assistants often toiled away, laboriously collecting documents and research to include in the next board book. And there was always plenty of calling, emailing, begging and scrounging to get the documents needed and the long list of meetings scheduled. Everyone had their own method, and if some part of the process was forgotten, left undone or lost in the shuffle of positional turnover, it just meant more work for the new people to clean up the mess and rebuild the wheel. 

No more wasting time. 

Cloud Concinnity® makes things agile in a whole new way. Here’s how. 

Out-of-the-Box Workflows

Workflow automation saves businesses huge amounts of time and frustration by organizing repeated tasks into their ideal sequence, creating consistency and efficiency while minimizing or eliminating the chance for error. In board work, activities like overseeing compensation, choosing new board members, or ensuring regulatory compliance all require the integration of data, conversations, and deadlines to make fully informed decisions — all coordinated between people who are all working remotely and infrequently. The repeatable nature of these tasks makes them ripe for automated workflows, yet we do not see proper utilization of this technology in today’s generation of board portals. 

What we have done is create a suite of out-of-the-box workflows that automate common board tasks. For example, a board secretary who needs to assemble information for approval of release of earnings statements can gather all financial documents by simply pulling up the workflow and clicking “Start.” A pre-defined series of emails and alerts will go out to the relevant players, reminding them of what is needed, who needs it, and when it is due. Everyone is clear on everything and everyone has more time to make it happen. 

Custom Workflows

We understand that every board is different and has its own approach to doing things. That’s why in addition to out of the box workflows we give our administrators the power to create their own workflows. Whatever the series of tasks it takes to prepare for a key board activity or bring on the next board director, Cloud Concinnity® will help lighten the administrative load. 

For example, if your board is helping with the strategic planning for a business expansion and you want to gather feedback and gain consensus from an array of stakeholders along the way to approving elements of the expansion that gets reviewed by everyone on the board, you can easily create a workflow that alerts, reminds, and confirms that everyone has indeed seen and read the relevant information. Then and only then will the next steps initiate, making sure everyone is on the same page and contributing to a team-wide sense of urgency and action.

Best Practices

When there is a better way to do a task or a series of tasks, we’ll tell you. Because boards of directors face many shared regulations, they have many shared challenges. Unfortunately, there is a vacuum around the need for shared resources and best practices, and far too many boards are operating in the dark — and far below their capacity as a result. 

We add best practices to our dashboard so every time a director logs in they are getting fresh knowledge. We add best practices advice to our workflow-builder so that no matter who is doing the building (or the upkeep) on a workflow, it can be polished and tweaked to always improve. Finally, we make our library of best practices resources available for challenges like HR, financial planning, and cyber-risk so that board directors can focus on how they want to tackle those challenges, not on the hours of research it takes to understand the key pillars of the solution. 

How Cloud Concinnity® Powers Agile Leadership

Today’s leaders understand that the world is moving at a rocket pace and that day-to-day business world is much more chaotic today than it was even just five years ago. The rapid digital transformation, shifts in corporate culture, and a tumultuous political landscape all mean that leaders must be awake, aware, and ready to act at a moment’s notice.

We call that agile leadership: operating as a proactive, adaptive leader in a changing world.

Agile leadership requires agile tools. While we see some of these kinds of tools maturing (think Dropbox, G-Suite, or Zoom), we also see that boards of directors are too often stuck with yesterday’s tools, like bulky board books and clunky board portals.

We are focused on how Cloud Concinnity® can power agile leadership. Here are three examples.

ACCESS: Making Fully Informed Decisions

Harvard Business School recently outlined the importance of making fully informed decisions, using Netflix’s forward-thinking model of board communication as an example. The crux is finding a way for board directors to have access to all of the information they need, and the ability to talk to key people within the company to ask follow up questions or do further research. Surprisingly, this kind of access to information is not the norm for boards at too many companies, where information is siloed into the board book or left out-of-context in reports that don’t tell the whole story. This is why we prioritize access to both documents and people in Cloud Concinnity®. Fully informed decisions are the natural extension of the overall recognition that data-driven decision-making is the best way to improve & grow. Data-driven does not mean just numbers — it means context and intelligent analysis of as much information as possible. Gut instincts or deferring to the highest paid person in the room are not good enough anymore.

For the board to be as effective as it needs to be, we believe board members need to be able to access current documentation & information, past materials for context, and be easily able to get in touch with anyone at the company who can offer depth or perspective on any particular piece of data. Our smart library of documents is specifically designed to make all relevant information and context simple to find, and we prioritize access to each other and the company experts to make sure that when you have questions you can find answers. Only then can board directors arrive at a board meeting ready to make fully informed decisions.

PROCESS: Streamlining Communication & Management

We make processes seamless so agile leadership can thrive. Cloud Concinnity® guides boards through their often complex responsibilities, offering streamlined workflows so that boards stay effortlessly compliant and have more time to focus on important things, like strategy, performance and managing risk. Today, Cloud Concinnity® members have the option of subscribing to over 40 workflows containing over 400 tasks for the management of key board activities from Annual Meeting Management and Internal Audit Oversight to Role Clarity & Culture Management. And because board responsibilities are ever-evolving, so are Cloud Concinnity workflows.

These workflows save time, anxiety and risk for everyone involved. Designed by subject matter experts, these workflows push out tasks and alerts as needed to directors and management, giving the hours and hours general counsels, board chairs and committee chairs currently spend designing and managing board processes. Building best practices means continual improvement is built into board work, and having all key activities, dates and reports automated means teams know they won't forget things or be late -- everyone will be on top of what needs to happen. 

We support secure, documented and ongoing communication so that agile leadership is a habit and the team is practiced in making decisions and communicating — that way process is a foundation that supports agile work whenever it is needed.

OUTCOMES: Empowering Meaningful Measurement

Measuring company performance is the ultimate bottom line, so shouldn’t a board tool have a way to understand company performance at a glance? We think so, and we couldn’t understand why other board tools seem to not offer this. For us, understanding board performance starts with understanding company performance because agile leadership requires up-to-date, 24/7 measurement. The Cloud Concinnity® company dashboard does just that — any board director can get an accurate understanding of company performance anytime from anywhere. It’s a foundation for making agile decisions that make sense.

The next level of measurement for agile leaders is self-measurement. This has long been a challenge (and sometimes a sore spot) for boards, and something that often gets politely ignored or delegated to an outside expert. In either case, the board is passing on what can be a powerful opportunity for growth. Transparency, accountability, and self-measurement can be a powerful source of ongoing information if peer evaluation is built into the process of governing. To facilitate this, Cloud Concinnity® allows board directors to evaluate each other and the overall outcomes using the same software they use to do their work, creating an elegant board scorecard that quantifies progress toward self-defined board goals and easy access to peer review options. This balanced board scorecard reinforces leadership team engagement and means that every director can get an understanding of where the company and the board itself stands in relationship to the overall goals all in one place. We see it as a revolutionary approach to building a responsive & robust leadership team.

For agile leadership to work, leaders need agile tools, and it’s our passion to create a board intelligence & management platform that is as agile as the modern board needs to be.

Interested in how Cloud Concinnity can make a difference for your board? Get in touch.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with elegant technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. 

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today. 

Why Your Board Portal Doesn’t Make You A Better Board Director

When board portals debuted a decade or more ago, the digitization of bulky board books was groundbreaking. Today, we are in an era where cross-device document sharing and digital collaboration tools are ubiquitous — except, it seems, in our corporate boardrooms. 

Board portals have done little to evolve beyond document storage, and where they are making updates, those changes are more patchwork and duct tape than transformation. More than a decade after bringing board work into the digital age, the available software is still lagging behind tools that the employees and leaders of the companies these boards advise take for granted in other aspects of their day to day work. 

They fall short in collaboration options, little or no guidance around common board work challenges, and thin options for accountability and measurement of board work overall. In short, board portals offer digital documents, but do little to help board directors do the actual board work, let alone get better at it or understand how effective what they are doing is in the big picture. To become a better board director, you need better software.

The World’s First Integrated Board Intelligence & Management Platform

This is why we call Cloud Concinnity® the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. It is a platform, not a portal, offering a toolkit for board directors to perform and measure their work in new ways. We built a platform for board directors to stand on so they can focus on doing great work, not playing administrative catch up. 

1. ACCESS gets better with COMMUNICATION

We built our software around integrated communication. It’s not an add-on, it’s at the heart of the tool, tying activities to documents to calendars to messaging to meetings. Instead of scrambling the week before a meeting to do research, submit documents, and get questions answered, you’ll be part of an integrated board team. Occasional and automatically timed alerts will keep you on schedule (instead of scrambling at the last minute) and secure remote work options mean everyone you need to talk to is reachable inside the network. Bryan Stolle has an excellent Forbes article about what makes a great board member where he points to traits like judgment, wisdom, ad courage. Becoming a better board director is about putting these kinds of traits to use, not getting mired in administrative details.

2. PROCESS gets better with BEST PRACTICES

Running through the veins of our software is the Concinnity Framework, comprised of 10 Imperatives that drive High Performance for boards. This framework picks up where board portals leave off — we advise your members on how to use the information and network at their disposal to do better work. In addition to our framework, we include an ever-growing library of best practices around common board challenges like financial planning, human resources, and compliance standards. On top of that, we offer automated workflows that tie together sequential tasks, cutting down the administrative burden so more time and energy goes to strategy. We do it so that your energy goes to applying the best approaches to your specific situation rather than wondering if there is a better way to do things. Becoming a better board director is about refining your style, not starting from scratch every time.

3. OUTCOMES get better with MEASUREMENT

Whether it’s McKinsey or the Harvard Business Review, the experts know that outcomes get better when they are measured over time. And we all know it too. The problem isn’t getting on board with measurement, the problem has always been doing it in way that is reasonable rather than disruptive. That’s why we’ve designed features into our software that allow directors to more easily know important metrics and oversee achievements at a glance. We created a balanced board scorecard so that board directors can give feedback inside the same tool they do their work in, and we created measurement criteria that offer non-intrusive accountability. Becoming a better board director shouldn’t be a whole separate job, it should just be an integrated part of doing your work.

To become a better board director, you need better software, and we’ve made it our mission to give you just that. 

Interested in how Cloud Concinnity can make a difference for your board? Get in touch.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with elegant technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. 

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today. 

Why Board Portals Don't Elevate Engagement

When a team of smart, savvy board directors put their heads and hearts together, there is nothing more powerful. Magic can happen and they can drive a company forward beyond expectations. 

But all too often, boards don’t communicate between meetings — or if they do, it’s sporadic and unanchored. They get stuck in first gear — always getting started, but not getting anywhere fast. 

To elevate board performance, boards must elevate engagement.

And no board can do that with a board portal.

• Board portals do one thing. Simply creating a digital version of the board book won’t get a board interacting — it will just give them one more account password to lose!

• Board portals go silent. We’ve all been on boards where it seems like everything ramps up a week before the meeting and stays hot for the week after. But in between the meetings, very little is happening.

• Board portals don’t evolve & grow. Your board grows, changes and builds on what has come before. Board portals are essentially static digital documents that mimic, but do not build on, what paper and basic word document programs already do.

The simple truth is that board portals will never elevate engagement because they are not designed to. 

ENGAGEMENT BEYOND THE BOARD MEETING

Boards don’t just need a portal, they need an intelligence & management platform. 

Cloud Concinnity® is just that — an integrated intelligence & management platform for boards who understand what it is going to take to up their game. We know board directors are under intense pressure from all sides. We designed this tool so they have a way to be consistently connected and elegantly efficient. 

And keep in mind: elevated engagement does not mean spend more time working. In our experience, episodic engagement that starts and stops around meetings ends up taking more time because everyone is playing asynchronous and unfocused catch up. Consistent, ongoing and informed engagement eliminates redundant relearning of the critical information, context and targets needed you need to be proactive and responsive.  Engagement is elevated in part because everyone develops that mental muscle memory and keeps it strong between meetings.

This is what a platform looks like when it is built for elevated engagement and higher performance:

ACCESS

Our platform is built around the idea of access to information — and each other — whenever and wherever it is needed. Where board portals simply hold documents, we make room for board directors to elevate their engagement through research and conversations by providing access to a smart library and a secure hub for messaging and conference calls.

PROCESS

In between meetings, directors benefit from our elegant network of automated workflows and alerts that keep everyone notified of next steps, elevating engagement and prompting board members well in advance to start important conversations and submit key documents. Everyone on the platform benefits from an evolving, growing best practices guidance feature where the tool itself helps coach board directors through tough transitions like on-boarding, crisis communication, and financial planning. Where board portals leave the process to you, we create a platform for growth.

OUTCOMES

Measurement is at the heart of elevated engagement, because in order to know what is working and what isn’t, we need to have baselines and consistent feedback. Board portals are silent on things like measurement, tracking and outcomes, we build them into the DNA of how our platform works. Rather than relying on outside experts, we make it possible for team members to self-evaluate and track progress on collective and company goals. What’s more, we provide a dashboard and balanced scorecard for next level transparency. 

We know that to elevate engagement you need a management & intelligence platform, not a portal — so we put the collective 100 years of experience on our leadership team together and built you the most powerful one available. 

Interested in how Cloud Concinnity can make a difference for your board? Get in touch.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with elegant technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. 

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today. 

Why Your Board Portal Can't Solve Its Empty Box Problem

Digital transformation promises a better way of doing business. When leveraged to its full potential, technology can indeed make us more efficient, more productive, and give us more time to think about things like strategy and performance. This kind of transformation is long overdue in the modern boardroom. 

Unfortunately, the current crop of board portals falls short at every turn, proving to be little more than empty boxes. Board portals are simply not designed to integrate all the information, communication and activities that a board is responsible for. Long on promises but short on usability, they will forever suffer from the empty box problem of under-leveraging technology.

• Where board portals could leverage technology to support collaborative work, instead they leave collaboration opportunities empty and simply replicate the board book’s clunky collection of bulky information without much support for follow up questions, research, or deep analysis.

• Where board portals could support board directors in working smarter, they are conspicuously empty, acting more like over-priced document storage tools with digital versions of the same long to-do lists that already turn board work into a grind.  

• Where board portals could make outcome measurement easier, they are again empty, leaving board leaders to cobble together band-aids that will never be up to the task. 

There is a better way. 

BEYOND THE EMPTY BOX

Our leadership team has spent decades being part of leadership teams, sitting on boards, and advising business leaders on how to excel. We have won awards, published books, and built companies that are still thriving because of strategies we set in motion. We understand the problems that have hamstrung boards and leadership teams in the past, and we understand how to solve them. It will take a lot more than the empty box of today’s board portals.

When we built Cloud Concinnity®, we built it with the people who will use it in mind. It is better software designed for how board directors actually want to work, and for how they can work well together. Each member of our founding team has experience sitting on boards and being part of real businesses that have successfully grown. We built it to solve problems we have experienced and know how to solve.

This is what a full box looks like, with all of the information, board intelligence, best practices, task sequences and tracking systems ready to go from day one.

ACCESS

We pre-populate the platform with important information that every new member of the team needs to know to get up to speed quickly. If on-boarding has always been a bit of a challenge inside the boardroom and c-suite, prepare to be blown away. 

PROCESS

We built industry best practices, beginning with our own Concinnity Framework, right into the DNA of the software. As directors and management use the software, they’ll be guided through processes to get the most out of Cloud Concinnity®, and get educated on the best, most efficient way to meet compliance guidelines and tackle regulatory challenges. To top it off, the tool itself can coach you through communication, HR, and financial planning challenges that are all too often thorns in the side of a board.

OUTCOMES

Every team needs to measure its progress, as well as that of the company. But too often that measurement feels clunky to collect and tough to implement. For boards, that measurement likely comes from an outside expert who just hops in & out without proper context, adding another layer of challenge. Our customizable company dashboards and board scorecards enable your team to evaluate itself in real time, meaning everyone is always on track and moving in the same direction.

Interested in how Cloud Concinnity® can make a difference for your board? Get in touch.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with elegant technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. 

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today. 

Why Your Board Portal Won't Solve Information Asymmetry

In the classic Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, three blind men come upon an elephant for the first time. Each person feels a different part of the animal and comes to a different conclusion about what it is. The one touching its trunk thinks it is a snake, while the one touching the tail believes it is a rope, and the one touching the leg asks if it is a tree trunk. Only you and I understand the truth — because we have all the information and can see the whole picture.

This story is the essence of information asymmetry, with each individual actor knowing just part of the story, allowing none of them to see the whole picture. All too often this ancient tale repeats itself in the modern boardroom, where the elephant is information and under-informed board directors are left feeling blind because of bad technology and practices.

Why Board Books & Board Portals Fall Short

The traditional board book creates information asymmetry at every turn. It is a static master document that is bulky, out of date the day it is printed, and impossible to reference while traveling. Board directors know only what is on the page, not the circumstances behind it and not the living context of how that information is evolving and interacting with the rest of the company. Where we need an information and communication hub, we get a static document attempting to represent a dynamic set of information. The board book is inherently unsuited to solving for information asymmetry, especially in the modern business environment.

Even board portals, while well-intentioned, solve just part of the problem. Yes, they can house more information in one place, but they fail to imagine how board directors and committees actually work together. Board directors are still stuck behind the 8 ball of information asymmetry.

What if board directors have questions? What about updates, memos, and important contextual information that is best delivered as it happens, not as part of a quarterly or annual information dump? How would a board portal designed to create electronic copies of the same old static quarterly information to answer those questions?

By simply replicating the board book in digital form, board portals leave tons of potential on the table and perpetuate the shortcomings of information asymmetry in the boardroom.

Moving Beyond Information Asymmetry

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Smarter technology holds the key to solving for information asymmetry.

Our work is centered around providing an “un-board portal” that is designed for how board directors actually work. A board intelligence and management platform, not a fancier version of the board book. A single secure hub for all information and communication needed to make fully informed decisions. 

Our information asymmetry busting features include:

• A “smart library” that houses all relevant institutional knowledge, allowing directors to truly understand the company; what it does, how it does it, and the numbers that show it. 

• Providing not just the information for the upcoming meeting, but context for that information, i.e. relevant historical, competitive or previously communicated information. 

• Allowing information to be stored simultaneously in various folders; i.e. by subject and by date, making everything easy to reference regardless of how you search for it.

• Streamlining easy access to regularly referenced material, from directories and governance documents to annual plans and financials.

• Providing dashboards and balanced scorecards to keep everyone focused on the same things.

• Ensuring secure access to meetings & conversations you may have missed, meaning you can keep up without the constraints of time and geography.

It is possible for everyone on the board to see the entire elephant. We simply need to make sure everyone has access to the whole picture so they can make better, fully-informed decisions.

Interested in how Cloud Concinnity® can make a difference for your board? Get in touch.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with elegant technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. 

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today. 

Why Better Technology Creates Better Corporate Culture, Starting With Boards, C-Suites & Investors

Peter Drucker famously told us that culture eats strategy for breakfast. And study after study tells us he’s on to something. Happy teams and a strong company culture mean higher performance across the board. Being named a Best Place to Work is associated with a .75% stock jump. A classic Harvard Business School study found that a performance-enhancing company culture correlates with 4x higher annual revenue growth. The list goes on.

We also know that leadership teams — the board, c-suite, investors, and managers -- set that tone. Company culture flows from the attitudes, priorities, and decisions of its leaders. 

With the digital transformation of work and business culture firmly upon us, what role does software play in corporate culture? Is it just a tool with no role beyond its business function? Or is it so deeply part of how we do our work that it is embedded inside what it takes to build a high performance corporate culture? 

We think smarter technology is essential to great corporate culture. Here’s why:

Agile Means Together, not Rogue.

Agile is a buzzword these days, but it’s often misunderstood. It does not mean people should go out on their own, acting fast and trying new things to see what happens. Agile work for a team actually requires a high level of coordination & commitment to a common cause. This requires an elegant balance of staying in touch and having enough room to breathe and get things done. Think Seal Team 6 or acrobats on a tightrope, not armies storming a castle’s front gates screaming with swords raised. 

Software like Slack, Dropbox, and Google Suite are designed to keep teams on the same page, aligned on next steps, and moving together in rhythm. Cloud Concinnity® is tailored to empower leadership to set the team direction, like a Seal Team Leader or the Circus ringmaster, with extra care around enhanced communication to emphasize security, process automation to curb busywork, and outcome measurement to track progress.

Systems Empower Free Thinking, not Hamper it.

Creative thinkers often buck at the idea of systems, spreadsheets, and measurement — and that makes sense. When wrongfully applied, systems can feel like a cage when they are really an untying of the ropes. Better technology doesn’t add busywork or increase repetitive tasks: it automates them to make room for creative thinking. 

When systems are running in the background, leaders can focus on what matters — strategy, performance and risk. Cloud Concinnity® does this by focusing on outcomes, automating the activities required to achieve them and providing a single secure hub for all necessary content, communications and intelligence.

Teams use Tools, not the Other Way Around.

When a team is small, staying on the same page is not hard. Four or five people talk enough to keep tabs on what each other is doing, and prompt each other to stay on task and aligned on things like timelines and quality. But once success and growth add people to the team, suddenly there are expectations, skill-levels, and understanding of the business are at all different levels. Tools need to evolve, change, and be added, and leadership styles need to change to keep up, as Julie Zhou points out in HBR. 

This is exactly why we shifted from consulting with leadership teams to building software for them. We know that the better an organization is at using software, the better that software can perform — and we went a step further, building industry best practices into the DNA of ours. That way when you use the tool you are guaranteed to be working at a high level. We think that’s smart, and it makes companies smarter, too!

Great Team Dynamics Are Critical to Success, not Just “Nice to Have.” 

Team dynamics are tough, whether it’s a team of two or a team of ten. In fact, data shows that 60% of new ventures fail due to problems with the team. It’s clear that growth depends on good team dynamics, and good team dynamics depends on all the gears of collaboration working together like a symphony.

Strong Technology Enables a Soft Touch, not Just to-do Lists.

We’re all busy and getting busier, with alerts and messages coming from all sides. And all too often when we do have some free time we use it to take on more tasks and get more done. At some point, it catches up to us. As HBR points out, managers and teams alike struggle with burnout. 

The solutions? Things like gratitude, compassion, and modeling self-care. While many leaders will “pooh-pooh” this as too touchy-feely for the corporate world, everyone from Deloitte to Harvard is telling us that these soft skills are the secret to success.

Technology that keeps us connected around tasks can also keep us connected around the gratitude, compassion, and self-care ideas we need to support ourselves when we’re not working as well. 

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Interested in how Cloud Concinnity® can make a difference for your team? Get in touch.

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5 Ways Focusing on Concinnity Makes Governance Sing

I served as the in-house counsel for a global pharmaceutical company that went through a rapid string of mergers during its growth process. Teams from different countries with staff speaking different languages were expected to adapt to working together, and fast. You can imagine the management challenges, ego clashes, and outright confusion as thousands of executives felt each other out and jockeyed for position. To say that different cultures had to come together would be an understatement.

In the midst of this, the company leadership brought the senior management together and sat us in the center of a great hall, encircled by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Wow. As the orchestra played, we all experienced what it physically feels like to hear and feel hundreds of strong, independent instruments come together as one harmonious whole. It was a literal experience of “concinnity.”

Concinnity is an elegant word that applies to great music and great corporate management alike, defined as “the skillful and harmonious arrangement or coming together of different parts of something.”

The experience of hearing all those sounds come together as one was powerful. 

The Lesson of the Conductor’s Baton

But even more powerful was the lesson of the conductor’s baton. 

Watching his baton, I saw that it was always a few seconds ahead of the orchestra. The conductor was showing everyone where they needed to go next, anticipating not just the music, but also how to guide each musician to do their individual part in a way that sounded right together as a whole. Yes, there was the sheet music that spoke to each of them personally — and then there was the baton that spoke to the group as a harmonious whole.

After that experience, I thought, how can we bake this experience into board work? How can we craft a subtle baton that guides the powerful independent players who make up every good leadership team? 

Imagine my delight, years later, at meeting my co-founder Nancy Falls and building Cloud Concinnity with our team. With the world changing at an ever-increasing rate, the only way to stay ahead of the puck is with good software. We simply can’t do it all alone — and good leaders know this.

Concinnity Makes Governance Sing

What I love about concinnity is this: 

1. The Harmonious Whole: Concinnity means a relentless focus on the harmonious whole, not on personal ego and fighting for credit. Success is in the coming together of the parts and competition with the outside world, not within the team.

2. Commitment to Best Practices: So many boardrooms and executives teams lean on “how we’ve always done things.” In the rapidly changing environment of today, that’s not good enough. Concinnity is inherently about a commitment to updating “how we do things” to align with current best practices.

3. Conversation as Default: Concinnity requires communication — early and often. Instead of keeping things to ourselves and sticking our heads in the sand for whatever reason, conversation and transparency become the default, helping everyone move through challenges much more quickly and as a team.

4. Clarity of Roles & Responsibilities: When everyone is clear on their personal starting point and the starting points of the team and company, everything moves forward in a synchronized fashion. And when the gears of governance are in sync, articulating and aligning with the greater mission becomes second nature, not guesswork. 

5. Give Leadership a Gentle Baton: Concinnity necessarily puts the baton the gentle hand of the leadership instead leaving those leaders scrambling to play catch up all the time. Governance can sing, and the music is beautiful.

We know that there are unprecedented levels of pressure on everyone in the boardroom and at the executive level. The old playbooks are crumbling and a new model is emerging. 

Streamlined access to information, efficient processes & engagement, and transparent outcome measurement are table stakes for playing the game of the future. Building the best practices for concinnity into the software itself is a master move. 

The sound of the orchestra is there for anyone to hear. Creating concinnity can make governance sing. The question is: will you listen to the lesson of the conductor’s baton?

Interested in how Cloud Concinnity can make a different for your team? Get in touch with us and we'll tell you how.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with elegant technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. To learn more about how Cloud Concinnity can help your board sing, visit https://www.theconcinnitycompany.com.

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today. 

5 Ways Smarter Technology Empowers Diversity in Corporate Governance

As we move toward a more visionary corporate governance and embrace emerging best practices in the industry, we see old playbooks and outdated thinking fall away one conference room at a time. A key element of this shift is inclusion and diversity in the boardroom and C-suite. For some, the shift toward inclusion and diversity is well-underway and the advantages are self-evident. For others, this nascent change is just getting started.

At every stage, we believe that intelligent technology can be end-to-end scaffolding for inclusion and board diversity in visionary corporate governance. In fact, the belief that smart technology is uniquely positioned to support the shift toward greater diversity in corporate leadership is one of the bedrock reasons our founders came together after decades of sitting in boardrooms and C-suites ourselves. A board portal alone is not enough. Cloud Concinnity® is the kind of smart technology that supports visionary leadership teams from end-to-end for building diverse intelligence into their boardroom and C-suite processes and dialogue. 

This is what smarter technology delivers:

1. Everyone Hits the Ground Running

Think back to when you started on your first board. Did anyone fully explain what your role as a board member was and what management would be doing? Or did you get a partial explanation and then… silence. Until, of course, you were expected to deliver value at that first board meeting. When any new person joins the board, they need to get up to speed before they can contribute. That’s just one way that having a diverse board is about more than having token women and minority professionals at the table. It’s about opening the room to a dialogue that actively recruits and incorporates a diversity of opinion and intelligence by getting everyone on the same page from day one.

Intelligent technology is built on the assumption that institutional knowledge needs to be passed on, and that passing it on is not the highest and best use of leadership’s time. Technology that lays out and reinforces roles & responsibilities of each board member starting on day one means far less confusion.  And when roles are changed, clarifying conversations of the changes being documented and shared promotes continued clarity.

2. Your Team Has Conversational Superpowers

The reality of modern work is that boards and leadership teams work remotely, while traveling and at asynchronous times. It can be a challenge to ensure that everyone’s opinion is included whenever it can be of value, especially during periods of innovation. The solution? An integrated technology that proactively draws diverse intelligence by pulling in everyone’s opinion and perspective when crafting strategy and guidance.

We built in the ability to have better asynchronous conversations by making sure that everyone has access to the most up to date information at all times. This creates a culture of elevated engagement by gaining input from the various perspectives. It also drives a culture of transparency in decision making that empowers leadership.

Emphasizing the need for other perspectives that are not our own when setting and re-evaluating strategy means diverse thinking becomes part of the DNA of everything you do. If this isn’t how your board operates today, this technology will meet you where you are.  It will introduce workflows that evaluate the perspectives now needed in the boardroom and gently drives the process towards supplying what has been missing. If this is already the habit in your organization, technology will make it easier. 

And imagine sitting down at your next board meeting with a strong habit of getting everyone involved in the conversation — online or off, that’s a conversational superpower.

3. You Always Remember The Right Questions

One of the biggest advantages that an inclusive and diverse board membership offers is intelligence by way of multi-faceted perspectives, and that means asking more of the right questions, every time. We believe in tweaking the “checklist manifesto”  thinking making sure we are always asking 360 degrees of questions. The result?  A diversity of opinion, perspective and voice becomes and remains a priority, no matter what the topic. 

When technology does the busywork, leadership has the freedom to think deeply. Time at your in-person meetings is preserved to really dig in to the diversity of opinion always waiting to make a team better.

4. Everyone Gets to Be More Human

Software exists to take work off of human shoulders. Instead of drowning in minutiae we need time and space to use our brains. A tool like Cloud Concinnity automates information-gathering checklists, keeps track of complicated timelines, and embeds best practices into every workflow so that it’s literally impossible to fall behind the curve.

Within Cloud Concinnity are workflows that ensure the board team is in sync with the best ideas in the industry. Coordinating hundreds of pieces of information to evaluate the state of the organization’s culture? SOX compliance? There’s a built-in workflow for oversight of that. Keeping current and past board information and notes in one place? There’s a built-in information workflow for that. Creating a forward-thinking and diverse board? There’s a board composition workflow for that. Indeed, technology can be a process-driver for change that gives us wings.

5. You Get to the Future First

Change can be overwhelming or empowering depending on how it is planned for and managed. As consultants, we spent much of our time coaching companies on updating their processes to take advantage of best practices. With Cloud Concinnity, we update the technology in line with best practices as they emerge so that our users are always in the lead.

This means staying out in front of changes in compliance, engagement, and self-measurement before you even know that those changes are happening. And that means making a commitment to diverse thinking that supports a truly visionary board and form of corporate governance. You don’t have to decide on each change — you just have to decide that you want to stay on top of best practices. We bake it into your experience so you are always out in front.

We are building this kind of powerful, robust future right now into the code of Cloud Concinnity, and we are already seeing teams make meaningful changes. Teams will use this kind of smart technology to bring greater diversity to the boardroom and empower more diverse voices and opinions as these new leadership teams come together. The future needs a visionary way to support and empower diversity in our leadership and corporate governance, and the way to make that future happen is coming into focus right now.

Interested in how Cloud Concinnity can support diversity on your team? Get in touch with us and we'll tell you how.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. To learn more about how Cloud Concinnity can help you get in front of digital transformation, visit https://www.theconcinnitycompany.com.

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today. 

5 Tactics for Getting in Front of the Digital Transformation

The digital transformation is happening. We see it everywhere we look — from the smartphone always in our pockets to the suite of software tools on our laptops. 

A recent Forrester study shows that business leaders are all over the map on what a digital transformation means. 56% of firms say they are transforming, while 21% say they are done. 22% say they are only now investigating or not transforming at all! As one respondent puts it…

“It’s a war between old-school technophobe leaders and the technology innovation that represents a completely different way of doing business.”

It’s here and it is real — and there will be winners and losers. Those companies with the willingness and foresight to believe in the digital transformation and figure out how to act on it will remain standing. Those who put their heads in the sand and fail to see the ongoing change that is our new reality will fall away like tumbleweed.

Here are 5 key tactics to start your team’s conversations about the digital transformation:

1. PLUG IN YOUR LEADERSHIP

Is your leadership plugged in? Are they plugged in to each other? The leadership of the company and of each department has to be using the same things and be willing and ready to make it happen all the time. Get buy-in first, then shift. 

Again, Forrester’s survey tells us that 45% of companies haven’t made SaaS investments yet. That is a shocking number when you think about how much time, money, and attention is saved when software takes work off of your plate.  When leadership is free to focus on forward-thinking strategy, companies will move ahead faster and leave resistant companies in the dust.

We are passionate about the board management part of that shift, building board intelligence beyond the board portal and baking best practices into the software itself. And our own leadership has ramped up our collaboration game as well, incorporating tools like Slack and Dropbox to streamline our days.

2. PUT CHANGE IN YOUR VEINS

One of the biggest barriers to understanding the role of technology in our collective business future is coming to terms with the idea that the transformation is ongoing. It is not something we implement and then walk away from — it is something we incorporate into everything we do. While IT and marketing departments are often out in front, smart technology can and will transform every department of a company. 

MIT’s Technology review tells us, with blunt truth: There’s no such thing as a “tech person” in the age of AI: We need to stop perpetuating the false dichotomy between technology and the humanities.

We love this quote and it speaks to all of us. We now live in a culture of transformation, at the office and at home, and technology is a big part of what is driving that transformation. 

So what does that mean when you think about your business? It means realizing that buying new tech is not the end, it’s the beginning. For new technology to be the culture change it can be, we have to train and adjust and reinforce. Making room for ongoing training is important, and making sure everyone on the team is fluent in the use of the new tech is critical to turning the wheels of productivity.

3. HACK YOUR CYBER RISK

Can you believe that only 31% of companies are worried about cyber-security? That means that 2/3 of us have a gigantic blind spot just waiting to let in a brutal slap in the face. Big companies like Target and Marriott know all too well how damaging a data breach can be to their reputation and business, not to mention the raw expense of cleaning one up.

Rashan Dixon has a great set of tips to get everyone at your business involved (not just the tech-savvy people), and this list gives you four steps you can take to get started with cyber-security. If you are at square one and really just want to get a ballpark gauge on what you should be thinking about, try Forrester’s quiz based on their Zero Trust model.

4. GIVE TRANSFORMATION A VOICE

Someone needs to own the idea of digital transformation at your company — and it’s not the IT department. Owning this idea Futurum’s 2018 Transformation Index reports that 40% of companies have a transformation team in place. That’s a great approach that brings in multiple perspectives. At the same time, every digital transformation starts at the top, with most people looking to the CEO and Boardroom to lead the way on this kind of transformation. A bold way forward is truly the only path that leads to the future.

When executive and boardroom leadership lead with vision and a team with their feet on the ground are researching and advocating for the best tactical SaaS and related changes, you can be sure that your company has the vision and action to stay on offense when it comes to the transformation.

5. LET THE EXPERTS KEEP YOU SHARP

Because digital transformation is an ongoing reality, keeping up with news, changes, and perspectives is critical. Aside from go-to digital publications like Fast Company and Forbes, here are a few of the sources we’ve come to trust:

• Wall Street Journal: The classic delivers with its dedicated digital section. 

• Forrester: It’s hard to beat a company focused on trends with a knack for sharing on-point insights. Relevant studies and articles appear at irregular intervals, but when they come they are fantastic.

• Harvard Business Review: Every week there is something in here that makes us think deeply about how the world of business in changing.

• MIT Technology Review: We love the deep dives that carry the attitude and rigor of their academic underpinning.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform.

To learn more about how Cloud Concinnity can help you get in front of digital transformation, click here.

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today.

How a CEO Should Deal with Activist Investors

It’s no secret that activist investing is on the rise. Forbes even talks about a “golden age” of activist investing, while the Financial Times points to the next generation as a new wave entering the mainstream. But for CEO’s and management teams, activist investors have been lurking in the shadows since the 1980’s. Whether out for profit, a cause, or both, they are here to stay. 

The question is how can a CEO make sure that they see it coming, and make sure that when it happens they know how to respond? Are there benefits to activist shareholders? Or is it always a form of sinister takeover that every CEO needs to be on guard for at all times?

Here are 5 things every CEO needs to keep in mind when an activist investor (or 10) comes into your orbit:

1. Think Like an Activist

Just like teams need to think like customers to build good products, CEO’s need to take a minute to think like activists. Take note of what issues are hot in the world right now, and especially track the ones that overlap with your customers and products. 

What is taking up space in the columns of newspapers and blogs that investors are reading? What political trends are motivating the news? Let the trends and the media be part of your early warning system. Activist investors will like to be heard, and there’s a good chance their concerns or issues will pop up on your radar in advance — if you’re paying attention.

2. Keep Your Board Close

We talk about this a lot at our office, and it’s one of the core reasons why we started our company. CEOs who have great relationships with their board directors are able to respond with agility, power, and grace in the face of the unexpected. It’s literally why we built Cloud Concinnity®, so that management has a pipeline to build the habit of touching base with their board all the time.

This is especially true with activist investors. When one comes out of nowhere — or even when you see them coming — you want your board of directors informed, on your side, and communicating. That kind of support needs to be cultivated over time and be something you start doing in the good times, not when the crisis has already hit and the game is on.

3. Do they have a point?

Sometimes activist investors have a point, and it’s worth truly listening to what they have to say. For example, the CalSTRS fund is taking an activist position in pushing Apple to add better parental controls to iPhones. BlackRock is creating a new fund to target companies around climate change and wage issues. 

For CEOs, the takeaway is that activist investors can often be speaking for a growing public opinion that otherwise wouldn’t find its way into the boardroom. Ebay is learning from and reacting to activist investors as we speak – and the result is dividend payments and more corporate stock buybacks. Papa John’s has made a “white squire” activist investor their new chairman. When you have a moment, listen. Cultivating wisdom is one of our best practice imperatives – and wisdom comes in all different shapes and sizes. Don’t take an automatically defensive position.

4. It’s Not a battle, it’s a conversation

As activist investing grows more and more common, it also grows more diversified. Not every activist investing group will be as combative as the traditional “corporate raider.” Activist funds will care as much as anyone about stock price and won’t want anything to tank. Some activist investors will want a big change – some just want a seat at the table.

As the Harvard Business Review points out, “A manager who understands that activists really only have power when they have a lever to persuade other shareholders should engage early to learn whether the activists’ concerns resonate with the rest of the shareholder base.” In any case, approaching activist investors from a standpoint of acquiring knowledge and learning from them rather than treating them as an enemy is savvy and easier.

5. Have a Plan in Place

Regardless of how you feel about them, having a plan in place for activist investors is key. First, you need to have a way to monitor investors in your company that you are reviewing regularly. PepsiCo survived and thrived through an activist intrusion largely due to their CEO being ready for it. Our CEO, Nancy Falls, did this with the help of valuable shareholder consultants back in her days of managing investor relations. At a minimum, using a spreadsheet to track publicly available information on investors is a starting point for cultivating this kind of awareness. 

Cultivating a process for shared analysis that all board members look at periodically is something we encourage our clients to do in Cloud Concinnity – being prepared is one of the imperatives we teach as a Concinnity framework best practice. The form is not important – the habit and the practice will save you from that surprise phone call.

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The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. To learn more about how Cloud Concinnity can help CEOs get an edge, visit us here.

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Concinnity newsletter today.

Welcome David Rue as The Concinnity Company's new Chief Revenue Officer

We are thrilled to announce that David Rue is now The Concinnity Company’s Chief Revenue Officer. David is a seasoned financial services and stakeholder communications pioneer who has been helping companies navigate capital markets and stakeholder communications with cutting-edge technology for more than thirty years.

David joins us from Bass, Berry & Sims where he served for almost 10 years in a number of leadership roles, including strategy and the development of technology enabled legal solutions. Prior to joining Bass, Berry & Sims, he spent 20 years with global financial communications firm Bowne & Co. He held various senior sales, management and marketing roles in Nashville, Atlanta and New York, including creating new technology tools to advance efficiencies in communications with corporate stakeholders. In addition, he founded an early XBRL-enabled SEC filing software company and launched a software platform to facilitate required SEC reporting of insider securities transactions.

Nancy Falls, our CEO, summed up our excitement in this way:

“Anyone who knows David will realize what a game changer this appointment is to a company like ours. He specializes in building and introducing new technology solutions to the boardroom and c-suite, a uniquely challenging group to reach. David could not be more perfectly suited to our company as we grow. He has a deep understanding of our customers and their needs and an intense devotion to exceptional service.”

And David said this about our mission and our software platform: 

“I have witnessed first-hand the power of smart technology to dramatically improve the way organizations function and communicate. Cloud Concinnity® is just such a technology; brilliantly designed to navigate ever-increasing challenges in the way boards, management teams, and investors work together and serve their stakeholders.”

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We sat down with David…

to hear even more about how he approaches his work, why he sees now as the perfect time for a tool like Cloud Concinnity®, and what he loves about being part of the Nashville business community.

What do you love about working with leaders in the boardroom & c-suite?

I’ve seen numerous examples of extraordinary success in the leadership of organizations. In those examples the central themes have been strong personal relationships and excellent communication. The opportunity to support and foster success in those relationships through excellence in communication has been the primary source of satisfaction in all the work I’ve done in my career from my days at Bowne to my time at Bass, Berry. Cloud Concinnity® can be a tremendous tool to this end and I can’t wait to share it.

Why do you think now is the right time for a platform like Cloud Concinnity?

The evolution of technology and the continual increase in the demands on c-suite and board members has created an urgent necessity to change the way boards function. Cloud Concinnity® offers the essential elements of access, process, and outcomes, and is distinguished from other solutions in its unique approach to agile and impactful process. There is no other solution like it. 

What are you looking forward to about joining the Concinnity team? 

Undoubtedly the thing I look forward to most is engaging with the exceptionally talented team at The Concinnity Company and working together to serve our customers with brilliant technology, excellent service, and joy. 

What do you love most about living and working in Nashville?

Nashville has always had a strong sense of self. We’ve watched over the years as the city has grown in its unique ways; economically, musically, spiritually, and culturally. The pursuit of excellence in so many facets of the city is palpable and contagious—from hot chicken to country music to technology and healthcare. I think Nashville is the kind of city where, if you look around long enough, you’ll find yourself and you will have enjoyed the search. Also, it still has a little grit to it. Both my cars got stolen last week. 

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Read the official press release about David Rue’s appointment to The Concinnity Company. David was also mentioned in Morningstar, The Nashville Business Journal, and featured in the Nashville Post.

Interested in following David’s journey at The Concinnity Company? Subscribe to our newsletter today!

The Board Book is Dead: How to Escape the Board Book Trap

Not so long ago, serving on a board was an entirely different ball game than it is today.

There were meetings several times a year, with the board book coming in the mail a few days before the meeting. Yes, it was as thick as a brick. But there would be that PowerPoint presentation in the meeting telling you what management needed you to know. The conscientious board member invested time reviewing and making notes on the “brick” and participated in the meetings, but save for the occasional big crisis, there wasn’t much engagement outside of these episodes.

Fast forward to today: the average public company director now spends an average of 30 hours per month on board work. Private equity portfolio companies can demand even more. Similarly, management is spending more and more time preparing for precious board meeting time.

What happened?

ENTER: CHAOS

External factors arose which drastically changed the governance landscape. These forces have created a major challenge to the episodic nature of engagement in most boards.

Think: the financial crisis, digital transformation, healthcare consumerism, the MeToo movement, cyber risk, trade policy, GDPR, activist investors—these issues can rock the foundations of companies. And each has either cropped up or changed significantly in the past decade, to create an even more rapid rate of change. Boards are no longer just managing risk internally, they’re now forced to deal with tidal waves of change entirely outside the organization’s control.

We’ve seen companies that were unable to weather the storm: American Apparel with its CEO crisis, the Theranos and Wells Fargo fraud scandals, and Sears’ inability to adapt to shifts in its industry.

External chaos is the new normal in today’s business environment, creating unprecedented and risky levels of pressure on boards, c-suites, and investors.

How do boards adapt to what today’s crises and pace of change require of them?

DYNAMIC ENGAGEMENT

Constant external flux demands that today’s board be agile, engaging dynamically with their work.

“Dynamic” is defined as “characterized by energy or effective action.” Ineffective energy and action are swirling around every organization, requiring agility from boards to keep pace with the change.

Critically, to engage dynamically does not require that a board involve itself in the company’s day to day operations. A board’s primary function is still to provide governance and guidance over the organization’s strategy, risk, and performance. But for most organizations, external forces can now create or necessitate dramatic changes in strategy, risk, and performance nearly overnight.

Today’s boards now function in two key realities:

The Board Book Is Dead

No individual element of board work highlights the contrast between static and dynamic engagement better than a board book. No one would hold out a shred of hope for a company operating from a 600 page manual produced and reviewed once per quarter. So why do we expect boards to use one as the primary source of information on the company?

Dynamic engagement requires that necessary and relevant information is pushed to the board on a continual basis, and delivered in media directors are able to effectively consume. Printed manuals and in-person PowerPoint presentations aren’t agile means of disseminating critical information. Effective boards are creatively adapting the content, timelines, and methods used to share and digest information.

Engagement Is Multi-Threaded & Always On

Traditional board/management team dynamics revolve around quarterly/monthly board meetings, with the CEO and other execs taking questions and processing feedback—a process and cadence that certainly no one involved has ever thought to be optimal. Business environments simply change too quickly and frequently in today’s world for this to be effective.

Dynamic engagement means that as the board is made aware of information, they engage with the organization appropriately and respectfully without overstepping boundaries. Perhaps that engagement simply involves making an introduction, or providing feedback on strategy, but speed and agility are absolutely critical in order for the organization to move as quickly as  needed in order to remain competitive, or even better, grow. Board members often possess vast amounts of relevant information and knowledge, and quickly capitalizing on that asset is one of the biggest competitive advantages in many industries today.

HOW TO GET STARTED

The truth is that top-notch directors have always engaged dynamically, and top-notch boards have never relied on the board book alone. But the chaos of the business environment today makes agility a necessary survival skill for every board, not just a luxury of the upper echelon.

It’s critical that management facilitates a single, secure hub for this communication and information-sharing to take place. An effectively engaged board utilizing insecure communication poses just as big of a risk to an organization as boards who aren’t engaged at all.

That's why we built Cloud Concinnity. Request a demo with our team today and let us show you how we can help your board and management team engage dynamically and become more agile.

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Discover the Cloud Concinnity difference today.

The Evolving Role of the General Counsel

Today’s Evolving General Counsel Role, the Board, & Corporate Culture 

Today’s General Counsel role evolves at the same accelerated rate of change as the companies it serves. It has expanded from what we think of as the traditional role—of being the legal risk manager,  supplier of legal services—to include being an advocate for an ethical and inclusive company culture. One very revealing fact is that organizations with an ethical and inclusive corporate culture can reliably demonstrate two other factors: the GC is vocal within the organization about important cultural and legal issues and has a good relationship with her/his board. 

We can see an evolution of business culture articulated by institutional investors. Blackrock CEO Larry Fink’s 2018 letter to CEOs of the companies in which Blackrock invests was a powerful wake up call for boards to assert their role in linking long term strategic growth to the engagement of all stakeholders, more likely with a diverse board and inclusive culture. The fact that he titled it A Sense of Purpose speaks volumes. 

Business does not happen in a bubble – it happens in the same world where we all live and raise our families. Companies are being called upon to do more for their employees and for their communities in a way that is sustainable, and they are being held accountable for such change by their Boards, who are being held accountable by shareholders. Boards have more to do, as does management, as does the General Counsel.

THE MODERN GENERAL COUNSEL

As we navigate this boardroom culture shift, how has this shift expanded the role of the General Counsel? It has expanded four foundational responsibilities:

1. Compliance, Risk Management & Prevention

The General Counsel has always been the corporate officer who carries the water for legal compliance/legal risk management and helps the company navigate its way through legal challenges. Today’s GC has a responsibility not only to be the “defender in chief” but also to offer advice to keep the company out of trouble. One of the best ways to ensure legal compliance by business units is by setting the appropriate tone at the top. If an organization is intentional about establishing its corporate values as including integrity and ethics, that mindset should become part of business decision-making.

By advocating for that behavior within the organization and by developing a collaborative relationship with the Board in its setting and overseeing the corporation’s cultural ethical values, the GC is a crucial actor in the company’s ability to achieve its long term strategies. 

2. An Advocate for Reputation & Culture

Things can be “legal” but still not be advisable in light of stakeholder interests, or the company’s long-term goals. If something is strictly legal it may still harm the company's reputation. It is part of the GC’s role to advise and counsel the company not only about about legal risks but also about events and policy that could damage the company's reputation and culture. Encouraging companies to think about internal practices that affect the company’s reputation in its community, and that reflect on the corporate culture internally is within the purview of the evolving role of a GC, one who has regular access to the company’s board of directors. Advising on the impact of policies that shape culture is proactive risk management. 

3. Savvy Assistance in Decision-Making

Thinking through the legal and cultural ramifications of business decisions is not only proactive risk management – it’s smart business. The role of the GC has had to expand into being more business savvy in order to give relevant legal advice.

When I started my legal and business career, the General Counsel was viewed as the person who provided and managed the course of all of the legal services for the company. The larger the company, the more complex this role. As my career progressed and the world changed, the role of in-house counsel evolved. For the in-house lawyers to understand the legal risks involved, they needed to better understand how the business worked. They needed to understand the levers within the company.

Forward-thinking lawyers began to get more involved, often embedded within business units. Consequently, they grew to become counsellors in the truest sense of the term, to not only prevent problems before they could materialize, but to offer innovative legal strategies that supported the business goals. The more I understood about business processes, the more the business people trusted that I was helping them figure out the best way to get their projects done, on time, under budget and without legal repercussions. It became possible for me to raise aspects of their projects they had not considered.

With the increased rate of disruption in the marketplace, the General Counsel is often in the best position to proactively advise the business decision makers about regulatory change that could affect business operations or new products being developed. That additional business advisory role complements and informs the GC’s broader role as an advocate for a culture of legal compliance and broader corporate values—always a great tactic for proactive risk management. 

4. Encouraging an Inclusive Culture

Business leaders are in their positions because they are visionaries who get things done. But the same things that make them successful there mean that sometimes they don't think about all of the issues.  

Today’s GC realizes the importance of diversity in decision making, and that having diversity in the workplace and on Boards is not enough. There needs to be a culture of inclusion, so that the Company gets the benefit of hearing varying perspectives that come from diverse voices. That includes having a Board that appreciates the perspective of a forward thinking GC, that she/he has life experience, business knowledge and a framework for thinking about the world that is unique and valuable. Someone who thinks about risk management and long-term implications first will see not just red flags, but also opportunities where a C-Suite and board may have a blind spot.

Being someone who is willing to speak up and advocate as part of the chorus of diverse boardroom voices may very well benefit the company’s bottom line as well as help keep it out of trouble.

Making room for things like Legal Risk Prevention, Advocacy of Reputation and Culture, Savvy Assistance in Business Decision-Making, and Encouraging an Inclusive Culture mean that today’s General Counsel is more than a legal mind—today’s GC is a critical part of setting the tone at the top and driving the corporate culture in a beneficial direction, one in which leadership is intentional about creating longterm, sustainable shareholder value and in being more responsive to stakeholders.

The State of Boardroom Strategy

Ever changing and ever-present risks are plaguing the boardroom. What steps are being made to tackle them?

A Statistical Snapshot On Boardrooms in 2017

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For a deeper dive into the evolving thinking around this evolving role, explore these reports:

• ACC: Chief Legal Officers Survey (2018)

• ACC Global Summit: Achieving Trust and a Positive Work Culture (2018)

• Raconteur: Including general counsel could prevent scandal (2018)

• Columbia Law School: How General Counsel Are Becoming More Essential in the C-Suite (2017)

• Bloomberg Law: Why the Role of General Counsel Is Expanding (2016)

• Harvard Law School: Lawyers as Professionals and as Citizens: Key Roles and Responsibilities in the 21st Century (2014)

5 Things Boards of Disruptive Companies Need to Watch

Anyone watching Silicon Valley companies lately knows that every disruptive breakthrough that redefines a market can turn around and disrupt their own growth if no one is paying attention.

Uber’s absentee board for much of Kalanick’s tenure is one example. The litany of privacy concerns and questions now plaguing Facebook is another.

Indeed, the things that make tech entrepreneurs great at disrupting industries can also plant legal landmines if no one on the inside is watching their back.

By the time we read about these stories in the news, it usually feels like someone inside should have seen it coming and done something – and that means either no one did (which is scary), or someone did and didn’t do anything about it (which is scarier).

Here’s what boards should be paying attention to for disruptive companies.

1.    The Charisma Trap 

All too often, charismatic founders ride on charm and chutzpah. That plays great in the media, but not so great in the world of governance. It’s the board’s responsibility to make sure that the glad-handing and bluster that plays well with the camera is backed up by legally sound paperwork and best practices. Founders aren’t supposed to know all of that stuff – the board is. And it’s the board’s responsibility to speak up, not get swept up. Uber could have saved itself a lot of bad press and a year of backsliding if they had taken action early on Kalanick, or even seen it coming and stepped in long before it became an issue in the media.

2.    Pushing the Envelope Too Far

Facebook is the current poster-child for this, but they are certainly not the only one. Have they finally pushed the privacy envelope too far to keep growing and save face? We’ll see. What we do know is that they repeatedly get in trouble for not putting the privacy of their users first. That’s the kind of thing the board should be pushing for – and it falls squarely in the lap of the modern general counsel.

3.    Skipping Stakeholders 

Stick around the Concinnity blog long enough and you’ll hear us talk about how important it is to mind the stakeholder gap. A disregard for stakeholders is an abdication of the basic responsibilities of a board. Every Board of Directors has a responsibility to identify who all of the stakeholders are in the organization and make sure that their interests are taken into account when decisions are made. With disruptive companies, it can be easy to ignore one or more sets of stakeholders in the name of speed and progress. Don’t. Executives, employees, customers, and suppliers all deserve a voice. It’s the board’s responsibility to give them one, and make sure the company leadership is listening.

4.    Not Preparing Culture to Grow

Startups have a reputation for emphasizing fun, flexible work cultures. That is great for internal team morale and cohesion, but it cannot come at the expense of planning for the structural and systematic requirements of growth. If a company succeeds, growth follows. And with that growth comes a larger staff and a team that will rapidly grow beyond the initial group of 10 or 12 employees. When the company hits 100, things will change a lot. When they hit 1,000, they’ll have changed again. The board can play an important role in emphasizing that the internal culture needs to adapt along the way, not ignore what’s happening and hope for the best.

5.    Letting Legal Lag

Growth will also mean governance realities and challenges most startup founders don’t even know exist. People start disruptive companies because they dream of making a difference, not because they dream of filing paperwork or dealing with SOX regulations. It’s not the job of executives to learn all that stuff -- It’s the board that needs to sound the alarm and help prepare the leadership to do what is necessary so that they can keep leading and growing the company.

Disruption is not doomed to fail.

Disruption can indeed be well-supported and done right.

The key is a strong board full of smart people who know their role and are willing to speak up.

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How The National League of Women Voters and The National Football League Found Concinnity

Not long ago I heard a story at a board colleague’s retirement dinner that made me smile

At the retirement dinner in late 1984 the staffs of both the National League of Women Voters and the National Football League were busy going about their respective businesses. Unbeknownst to them, their worlds were about to collide.

The League was hard at work getting agreement between the campaign staffs of Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan on the particulars of the fall presidential debates, something which, I understand, is about as easy as negotiating a major trade agreement. At long last the dates were settled and the staff went about the process of notifying the media. Almost immediately the president of the League of Women Voters received a phone call from a senior executive with ABC television.

As it turns out, ABC had the rights to broadcast the Sunday night NFL games that year, and the campaigns and the League had picked a time for one of the debates that conflicted with an already scheduled NFL game.

The ABC executive was in a real pickle, and he let that be known in no uncertain terms. ABC was contractually obligated to the NFL to broadcast the game; violating that contract would have cost the network millions of dollars. But broadcasting in a time slot conflicting with the presidential debates amounted to public relations suicide. He was hoping to convince the League of Women Voters to change dates.

The reality was that the league president was between her own rock and hard place: bringing the Mondale and Reagan campaigns back to the negotiating table would be no easier than renegotiating an NFL broadcasting contract.

So the president of the League of Women Voters had a better idea, much to the shock of ABC. Why not just call the NFL commissioner and talk it over? Undoubtedly a good percentage of the NFL audience wanted to watch the debates and, no doubt, there were plenty of voters who would be torn between the debates and the game, which is to say these two leaders had a number of stakeholders in common.

They needed a skillful, harmonious, and elegant way to piece together the various parts of this shared dilemma. They needed concinnity. And they got it. With the help of the commissioner, the debates were moved up a half an hour and the game was moved back. Everyone gave a little, and everybody won.

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The 10 Most Common Corporate Governance Mistakes

EFFECTIVE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IS A HALLMARK OF ANY HIGH-PERFORMING BOARD AND EXECUTIVE TEAM.

We believe that governance and leadership are the most important ingredients for high-performing organizations, and of course, governance is half the battle, although often overlooked.

Below are the ten most common corporate governance mistakes we typically see:

1. Failure to clarify roles and responsibilities between the CEO/C-suite and the board.

2. Failure to get the right people around the boardroom table, fully engaged, and doing the right things.

3. Failure to develop a consensus in detail about where you are, where you are going, and how you will get there.

4. Failure to tend carefully to the interests of multiple, diverse stakeholders.

5. Failure to be deliberate about exactly what information the board needs to do its job.

6. Failure to be clear on the board’s responsibility for culture and its role with the CEO in managing and changing it.

7. Failure to get CEO and C-suite compensation right.

8. Failure to understand CEO (and C-suite) need for a coach and the board’s very different role as a boss.

9. Failure to appreciate the inevitability of CEO, C-suite, and boardroom turnover, and inadequate efforts to keep it positive.

10. Failure to actively cultivate wisdom in the boardroom: thinking vs. doing, reflecting vs. reacting, compassion vs. insensitivity and uncaring.

Each of these mistakes has its origins in a failure to be deliberate in pursuing consensus, working together in harmony, and approaching corporate governance through concinnity.

Step one to resolving these issues is certainly awareness, but an important second step is accepting that good governance is a journey, whether you have deep experience or are new to it. Those who do it well seek sustained excellence and appreciate the journey, and by no means adopt an attitude of “been there, done that.” And of course, achieving good governance is a journey you take with other board and executive team members who may or may not share your depth of experience or views.

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