Run your board like an investment committee
Three habits from the investment committee that make any board faster and better.
I have sat on investment committees, first as a founder member of Clearbrook Capital Partners, where we invested in real estate, financials and business services, and I have chaired and sat on company boards since. The best boards I have seen behave like good investment committees.
Write down why, before you decide
Write down the reason for an investment before you make it. It makes the exit decision honest. The same applies to any major board decision: record the thesis and the conditions under which you would reverse it. When those conditions arrive, the decision is already half made.
Disagreement belongs in the room
Disagreement belongs in the room and in the minutes, not in the corridor afterwards. A board where every vote is unanimous is usually a board where the real debate is happening somewhere else.
Spend time on what cannot be undone
Separate the decisions that can be reversed from those that cannot, and spend most of the board’s time on the second kind. Hiring a senior executive, raising on a particular structure and entering a new market deserve the hours; most other things deserve minutes.
Boards that work this way move faster and make fewer expensive mistakes. I bring that discipline to every board I join, alongside deal experience and a practitioner’s understanding of AI.