The Board – Theory and Practice – Page 2

Children Are Not Small Adults – The SmallCo Board Is Not A Small BigCo Board

By The Unlisted Board|2021-07-23T12:00:57+01:00August 21st, 2020|The Board - Theory and Practice, Short Articles, Realpolitik Extracts|

Extract from Chapter 1 of Realpolitik “Eight Essential Aspects Of Small Company Boards” Essence 2 – The SmallCo Board Is Not A Small BigCo Board That Companies change over time is so apparent that it barely merits mentioning. However, its corollary – that the Board needs actively managing – can all too often be neglected. At inception when the Muse drops an idea into your mind you are the show of course. For substantive ideas you will need to build a team below you and a Board around you to help you nurture your tiny infant and grow it into a safe strong adult. SmallCo and BigCo

Boards As Cauldrons Of Emotion: Power! Betrayal! Plotting! Deceit!

By The Unlisted Board|2021-07-23T12:01:03+01:00August 14th, 2020|The Board - Theory and Practice, Short Articles, Realpolitik Extracts|

Extract from Chapter 1 of Realpolitik “Eight Essential Aspects Of Small Company Boards” Essence 7 – Cauldrons Of Emotion: Power! Betrayal! Plotting! Deceit! “On one Board a lifelong friend stabbed me in the back.” Boards are comprised of people not robots. This needs emphasising as Board-inexperienced folk can have far too much of a “bloodless” legal/regulatory concept of the Board. If the reality – that one side of the Board coin is “legals” and the other “realpolitik” – was accurately reflected then half the books and courses on the market would be about “emotions” not “logic”. Which they manifestly are not.Given that the Board

The Early Stage Startup Is A No Bread Sandwich And Why It Needs Bread

By The Unlisted Board|2021-07-23T12:01:11+01:00August 7th, 2020|The Board - Theory and Practice, Short Articles|

You can if you really want make a no-bread sandwich - you can fool yourself, as in the picture above that two slices of cucumber can make a sandwich or cheat with an approximation like rice paper wraps - but then you end up with a spring roll. They can be great but they are not sandwiches are they?As we covered in last week’s article the deeper nature of creativity is mysterious, mankind’s God-like ability to create what did not exist before is a truly wondrous thing. But once you have recovered from all that numinosity and got it home

Prometheus the Muses and the Startup

By The Unlisted Board|2021-07-23T12:01:23+01:00July 29th, 2020|The Board - Theory and Practice, Short Articles, Realpolitik Extracts|

Extract from Chapter 1 of Realpolitik “Eight Essential Aspects Of Small Company Boards”Essence 1 – The Top Priority Is Growth And A Good Board Helps You To GrowStarting up is an act of creation that needs nourishing, it needs nurturing, it needs growth and feeding without which it will die. Regardless of which economic sector you are in, which country you are in, it all starts the same way. You have an idea. An idea about a product or service. An idea about a gap in the vast panoply of provisions already available. Naturally there are very few gaps in mature economies.

What Serial Entrepreneurs Know About The SmallCo Board That First-Time Founders Don’t

By The Unlisted Board|2020-08-21T08:54:27+01:00July 20th, 2020|The Board - Theory and Practice, Longer Articles|

There is one mistake that is so common that it is near ubiquitous amongst the inexperienced first-time Founder when it comes to their company’s Board. Over the past six years I have podcasted with getting on for 150 founders and over the past two and a half years, in the course of writing "The Realpolitik Of The Unlisted Company Board" interviewed over eighty SmallCo Board members - most of whom were founders. So I’m in no doubt about the mistake. Not just that but the dynamics that lead to it. It is this - first-time founders do not take