Board Director | 3x Public Company CIO | University Advisor
Video Transcript
Don't over-assume that they know more than they do, because usually they don't.
I mean, you can look at the backgrounds. I'd look at the backgrounds of each one of your board members. Some companies will absolutely have some folks with a strong technology background. Some CFOs will have some, because they probably had the IT function reporting to them in many companies. So, they may not have a deep understanding, but they have a good understanding of it. But I'd kind of assume, going in, that they don't know a whole lot about it.
The best way to communicate to your board -- whether it's around cyber, or whether it's around technology issues -- and believe me, Brian, I'm giving this advice from the standpoint of having done it wrong for many, many years, and learning the hard way. And you get good perspective, having presented to boards and then having been on a board of what they're, you know, that kind of fills out the 360-view of what you need to do.
But my number one thing in this is: Ditch the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint can come across overly technical, and you're probably not hitting on the issues that they want to hear. PowerPoints are fine for a pre-read, and I think you should treat them that way as the point you want to get across. But when you go to actually talk to the board, have a conversation. Talk in English. Speak in business terms. What's at risk? They don't need to know everything.
I'll give you an example. We you know, we had an Armstrong board meeting a month ago or so. Unfortunately, our our CIO had a death in the family, and she couldn't present. As typical, she was the last speaker on the board agenda to go over a major ERP implementation that they were having that the board is nervous about. She wasn't there. We were going to postpone the presentation to the December meeting.
But then the board just looked at me and said, “Hey Wayne, you know, what's going on here? Just give us the skinny.” I just kind of said to them. “Hey, look, they’ve got a plan. It's the prototypical plan. They're doing all the right things. You'd be proud of the plan. It's very professional. They've got no stone unturned. They're doing all these things. But today there's been no friction against the plan. We’ll have to keep guarding against it, see what happens as they go to execute. They do have a 30-day plan and a 90-day-later plan, and the CEO’s not afraid to execute.”
We had a very, just common conversation about what usually is a normally technical conversation. It was five minutes long and the feedback from the board was, “That was fantastic.”
I just because I talked in terms they can understand. We put the PowerPoint aside. We talked in business terms. We talked about the plans that we had. what the risks were, what we were doing about the risk, and what the next steps look like. And that's what they want. Try to entertain questions as much as you can and move through that. I think that's what they're looking for. And we can drown them in dizzy them in PowerPoint that will only frustrate them and confuse them more. So, speak in English, have a conversation—a business conversation.