I recently attended the inauguration of Roz Mallet as the new board chair of the National Restaurant Association. It was a special moment for the restaurant industry…Roz is the industry association’s first black woman to chair the National Restaurant Association. This is a big deal…if you are not familiar with the restaurant industry, you should know that the restaurant industry is one of our nation’s largest private sector employers (over 12.9 million jobs) and over one-half of all adults have worked in the restaurant industry at some point in their lives, and one-third received their first job experience in a …

Separating the CEO and Board Chair roles? A great question! Two weeks ago, Kaye O’Leary participated on a panel discussion on “Corporate Governance and Your Private Company”. The event was sponsored by MTK Accounting (Moquist Thorvilson Kaufmann & Pieper LLC), Monroe Moxness Berg and Tevera Consulting and covered a number of governance topics that are specific to privately-held businesses. It was a great session and our thanks to MTK for organizing the session and including Tevera. During the Q&A session, an audience member asked if we thought it was a good idea to separate the role of the Board Chair …

I read an article this morning from the Brisbane Times titled “More Room for Women at the Top” http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/executive-style/executive-women/more-room-for-women-at-the-top-20120101-1ph1c.html . My initial reaction was positive. I thought bravo for the Australians. In 2011, they successfully added 65 female directors to ASX50 (Australian Stock Exchange’s largest 50 corporations…”women accounted for 40% of new board member appointments to ASX50” companies this past year. 19% of ASX50 directors are now women. Compare this to U.S. corporate boards where, according to Spencer Stuart’s 2011 review of the proxy statements of the S&P 500, 16.2% of corporate directors are women and 9% of all boards …

Innovation. Corporate Governance. Two business concepts that are not often used together in the same sentence. Maybe it is time for Innovation and Corporate Governance to have a ‘Reese’s Moment’ and for boards to ask: ‘Who put the Innovation in my Corporate Governance?” While products, services and society have been rapidly and dramatically changing, the only changes that have occurred in the boardroom have been driven by legal and regulatory changes. Boards Resist Change My impression, which is most likely over-generalized, is that Corporate Boards resist change. Here’s just one example that I’ve observed: • Board Books & Technology – …

My first experience as a board member was with a non-profit board in the Twin Cities. A not much older but, very much wiser, board member told me to remember one rule of board service: the NIFO principle, or “Nose In, Fingers Out”. I was reminded of the value of NIFO recently when a non-profit organization that I know of ran into difficulties with one board member who crossed the line between governance and management. The difference between Management and Governance What does NIFO mean? A great board member needs to understand that the organization’s leadership/management team is running the …

There is a common belief that effective business leaders don’t necessarily make effective elected officials because of the notion that running a business is very different than running the government. Hmm…yes, the processes of how you get things done are markedly different, but, there are also commonalities: people and the need to motivate and unite large and disparate groups of people. Our elected officials should take a few notes on how effective business leaders use tenets of strategic planning to accomplish this and consider how to apply this to our government. Further consider that there are a lot of things …

Cindy and Kaye were joined last week by Rich Erstad, former General Counsel for Buca (and currently General Counsel with Hawkins) in addressing Ron James’ Ethics Laboratory at the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas. We shared the story of the ethics and governance crisis at Buca that occurred under prior leadership in the early 2000’s. The class consisted of full-time MBA students in their second and final year. We shared the story of ‘What Really Happened’ at Buca and then talked about how the new leadership team led the company out of the crisis. For …

Ken and Kaye recently returned from attempting to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro – the highest peak in Africa. They were not successful. Flying home, discouraged and dejected, they reflected on what they had learned along the way and what they could have done differently. These reflections also started them thinking about the inherent leadership lessons that they learned along the way: 1) You Can’t Plan for Everything 2) Prepare Your Team for Adversity 3) Embrace Cultural Differences This is the third, and final, blog in a three-part series that shares their adventure and the leadership lessons they learned along the way. …

Ken and Kaye recently returned from attempting to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro – the highest peak in Africa. They were not successful. Flying home, discouraged and dejected, they reflected on what they had learned along the way and what they could have done differently. These reflections also started them thinking about the inherent leadership lessons that they learned along the way: 1) You Can’t Plan for Everything 2) Prepare Your Team for Adversity 3) Embrace Cultural Differences This is the second blog in a three-part series that shares their adventure and the leadership lessons they learned along the way. When we …

Ken and Kaye recently returned from attempting to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro – the highest peak in Africa. They were not successful. Flying home, discouraged and dejected, they reflected on what they had learned along the way and what they could have done differently. These reflections also started them thinking about the inherent leadership lessons that they learned along the way: 1) You Can’t Plan for Everything 2) Prepare Your Team for Adversity 3) Embrace Differences in Cultural Norms. This is the first blog in a three-part series that shares their adventure and the leadership lessons they learned along the way. …