Early in my career I had a boss, successful and entrepreneurial, who gave me this piece of advice: “Jim, you have to give people ideas. Most people do not have ideas.”
Most people have ideas . . . but I know what he meant. His longstanding success was based on giving people ideas that grew sales, helped develop new products and services, started new businesses, honed new strategies, forced new ways of looking at their operation . . . in short, ideas that created value.
Those are the ideas that are in short supply and high demand.
His advice has stuck with me all these years. It is certainly sound advice for being an editor. Editors like myself are in the idea business. We live on coming up with topic ideas and finding just the right authors to address them to create value for our publications and our readers.
And so is a board member in the idea business.
A common perception of a board member is one who simply blesses management's ideas. But that likely has always been more misperception than reality.
Good board members are, or should be, brimming with ideas when they walk into a board meeting. We all know that activists are coming to boards with plenty of ideas for what management and the board can do to create value. Activists can't have all the good ideas.
In this spirit of idea generation and idea sharing, the Article of the Month in this January e-Briefing offers what could be a game-changing idea for board renewal. And Directors & Boards Publisher Robert Rock, inspired by the arrival last year of his first grandchildren, takes to the Columnist slot to share some “best practice” ideas for living a successful life that he wishes his new granddaughters to embrace. You will see that these are embraceable ideas for all.
When it comes to coming up with ideas in a governance context, Thomas Horton had it right. Tom was a past columnist for Directors & Boards and a close colleague, a former chair of the National Association of Corporate Directors, and a much-admired business leader. (He died in 2003.) Addressing the topic of groupthink in the boardroom, he wrote: “Creative ideas spring from individuals, not from groups.”
As 2015 dawns, it would be well for directors to affirm that they are in the idea business. There will be challenges aplenty to meet and opportunities to seize, so a concerted effort to bring good ideas into their boardrooms this year will be what directors need to do. As always, I welcome your comments at jkristie@directorsandboards.com.