All Above Board—Creating the Ideal Corporate Board

The role of the company board, the CEO, and the Chairman are critical to establishing a positive leadership culture in any organization. At a time when leadership failure at board level has been headline news and when in a period of economic stress corporations are under great pressure to create shareholder as well as wider social value, strong and effective leadership from the boardroom is more essential than ever.

Based on interviews with over 60 chairmen and CEOs from leading multinationals such as Volvo, e-Bay, Tesco, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Unilever, the author looks at bad boardroom behavior and explains how real and effective changes can be made to improve the workings of the board. This rare access gave author Ulf Lindgren unique insight into the current workings of some of the world's most influential boardrooms and a real sense of how boards might perform more effectively, based on a strong consensus of views from the chairmen and CEOs he interviewed.

The author draws out a number of conclusions from the interviews, which he sums up into 4 key values that today's boards should hold:
1. The board should take an active role in strategy, push for innovation, and boost peak performance of the corporation.
2. The board members should be recruited to match the specific needs of the corporation.
3. The board should act as One Team and its chairman should be a strong leader who's selection should be based on superior competence
4. For best efficiency there should be a complementary chairman/CEO "tandem at the top."

ULF LINDGREN founded the Nordic Management Group in the 1980s. He has since been a Director and Board member of Bain & Company International Inc., and Founder and Managing Partner, Bain & Company Nordic. He was actively involved and played a role in the foundation of Bain Capital Europe in the late '90s. He was the Founder and Executive Chairman of Net Insight AB and also co-founded and was a Director of BTS Group. He remains a Senior Advisor to a small number of private equity firms and serves as senior advisor and board member of several large global corporations through his London-based advisory company, Nordic Advisors Limited. He was involved in the establishment of Endeavor Inc., U.S.A. (a not-for-profit supporter of high-impact entrepreneurship). He is currently a Director and principal investor in Safe Technologies Limited, UK. He has been Assistant Professor of International Business and Finance, Stockholm School of Economics, and a Visiting Lecturer at IMD, and at the Swedish Institute Management. He has been Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD, and is currently Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship. Ulf Lindgren was the Dean and Executive Director of Lorange Institute of Business in Zurich.