1. What have you taken out of the course and why were these lessons meaningful to you.
As a successor to a family business and prospective future Board Member of my family business, I
have learned a lot from this course.
The first learning is that the board has an important role of protecting the company’s future. Even
though we have executives and managers who have long-term vision rather than ,only, thinking
about next quarter or next year, it is the board members duty to see that future managements also
always have that approach.
Second, the board must be independent of management. All the policies on board composition,
tenure, carefully described position descriptions of the board and its committees, the agenda’s and
the matters to be brought to the board, the board’s annual review and its relation to
management—should be designed to make the board independent and responsible.
Thirdly, an ideal board cannot be independent and future oriented, if it has members from
management team. The board becomes less autonomous, less challenging, less willing to criticize,
and less focused on planning and management succession when management executives sit on the
board.
Fourth learning is that to fulfill the role of a board, either the board or the executive committee
needs a chairman who is not the CEO. There are two reasons for this; one is that a combination
chairman-CEO wears two hats that cannot really be worn at once. It is chairman’s responsibility to
optimize the working of the board or the executive committee, to promote discussions, questions,
challenges, and even criticism. On the other hand, it is the role of the CEO to formulate, present and
sell the future plans and programs for the company to achieve ambitious goals. Second reason is
that if the CEO is also the chairman, the board or the executive committee cannot be independent,
the CEO alone controls the company meetings, the agendas, calls for the vote, and often even
selects the directors.
Fifth learning is that to fulfill the role of corporate governance, the board needs to have a well-
informed and independent view of the corporation, its strengths and weaknesses and its
management. To get this perspective, the chairman of the executive committee should be
responsible for giving the board an unbiased view of the state of the corporation and the strength of
the management team. Either a non-CEO chairman of the board or a chairman of the executive
committee achieves such a task.
These learning’s are important to me because as a future Board member of my family business it is
important for me to know the role and importance of a good board. Over the past few weeks, I have
been enhancing my understanding about corporate governance and role of CEO. I understood that
building an effective board is a process and requires commitment from the leaders of the board. I
think knowing theory is as essential as putting the knowledge to practice. After knowing the role and
importance of corporate boards I am in a better position to take informed decisions for my
company.

2. How these lessons will influence you as future professionals.
Engaging and Exploring & Deciding & Implementing Evaluating
Framing Eliminating Explaining & Executing & Learning
Out of all the lessons I think Fair Process Leadership is the one that will influence me the most in
future. I think fair process is of utmost value in today’s world. It is a powerful tool for companies
transitioning to knowledge-based companies where value creation depends on innovation. I feel in a
family business most of the decisions are taken more by emotions and less by rationalities. By
incorporating FPL, I will be able to evaluate and incentivize the employees in a rational and fair
process, thus encouraging the employees to achieve difficult tasks by cooperating with each other.
Also, to incorporate fair process in my day-to-day living, I will be willing to share knowledge with
others. I always thought that retaining knowledge and keeping employees at arms length gives me
my seniority. However, I am wrong in this approach, I have understood that in a fair process by
knowledge sharing and refinement we can improve organizational performance and enhance
employee satisfaction.
Secondly, a key change in my behavior and mindset
after these lessons will be to overcome my temptation
to micro-manage. Practically I can share
endless stories about me spending endless hours
discussing irrelevant subjects while neglecting
major issues deserving my more careful analysis. Now I
feel it is critical that I focus my attention on items of
vital importance to the organization. To do this, I
would try to change myself and avoid the temptation to
micro-manage or meddle in lesser matters or in areas
that are more appropriately handled by the professional staff.
Third key difference would be appreciating external directors. I think I underestimated the benefits
of having external board members (non family members). Now, I have learned that I can get to learn
a lot from the experience of non-family member directors. As long as we choose our directors right,
we have at our disposal abundant knowledge on the field of business. They can help me with the
things that I don’t know. By having subject experts, I can avoid disastrous investments that
otherwise I might commit because of lack of knowledge.

3. What suggestions do you have for future editions of the course.
KEEP Eliminate/Stop Doing CREATE/ START DOING
 Interesting  Minority shareholders
cases  Family Business
 Frameworks  Cases from developing
 Engaging the economies
class
REDUCE/ DO LESS OF INCREASE/ DO MORE
 Time to discuss  Current Events
frameworks  Conversation in class
 Speed when showing  Reference to codes of
slides corporate Governance
In addition to what we had discussed in class, to make this course better, I would suggest discussing
some cases from developing economies for two reasons.
First reason is that most of the companies in developing economies are family owned. The belief set and
assumptions of family members in these countries is very different from the mindset of western family
businesses. By discussing these cases, the class will benefit by gaining insights into developing
economies’ corporate governance.
Second reason is that many Indian family businesses die within two or three generations. One of the
main reasons for the failure is lack of corporate governance. Transforming independent proprietary
enterprises into large family owned corporation requires an adequate governance mechanism. By
studying cases of companies such as Tata, GMR, Wipro etc. we can gain insights into the
motivation/inspiration behind letting go off traditional ways of running a business and challenges faced
by these companies to write and implement corporate governance mechanisms and how they were able
to overcome these challenges given the limited top-level talent pool in India.