Telling the Good News About Boards

As I near my silver anniversary at NACD, and as NACD approaches a golden half century of service,  I have become more introspective about our association’s role in the world.  Does the world need us, and if so, why?   

It’s only fair to ask. After all, associations come and go based on needs. My old friend shareholder activist and director Ralph Whitworth, who founded United Shareholders Association with oil man T. Boone Pickens, launched that group with the goal of reforming proxy voting. When those reforms happened, the association disbanded. NACD’s founding goal of governance reforms met with similar success. Shortly after I joined NACD, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the following year stock exchanges adopted listing rules that reflected (in part through our advocacy) what we had been recommending in our Blue Ribbon Commission reports—including Director Professionalism led by the late, great Ira Millstein. 

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if we had decided to pack it up back then, believing that our work was done. Actually, it was just beginning. In the years following SOX, we have grown—from a membership of fewer than 2,000 directors when I came on board in 2001 to nearly 25,000 today. What fostered this growth? NACD has succeeded in part because directors find our programs, publications, and networking useful. As this issue of Directorship shows, we keep the dialogue going about important issues such as climate risk and diversity; we cover emerging regulations on cybersecurity and other matters; we bridge the experience gap for new directors; and we take a hard look at what goes wrong in boardrooms such as that of OpenAI—the occasional bad news we all must face. 

But an even more important role for us is to tell the good news about boards. At an official March 6 Public Company Accounting Oversight Board roundtable on proposed requirements for auditors and audit committees, R. Brad Martin, vice chair of FedEx Corp., an NACD member company, reported in detail on the risk oversight practices of his board. Here was a director who knew exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. After watching him speak at the roundtable, a staff member said to me, “Now I understand what NACD is all about.” My sentiments exactly.■

This article is from the Spring 2024 issue of Directorship.