57. Management Presentations (definition)

NOTE: if you’re new to Ground-Up Governance, or are finding anything a bit strange or confusing, you might want to START HERE.

With pre-reads, we covered information-sharing before board meetings. What happens *during* board meetings also has a big impact on information asymmetry between the board and executives. Most corporations dedicate a big chunk of their board meetings to management presentations, where the CEO and other senior executives stand at the front of the boardroom and tell the board the stuff that they think the board needs to know to make good decisions. If you take a second to think about it, you’ll realize right away that making a great management presentation is hard. It’s like trying to write and perform a play that will captivate and educate a bunch of people with different tastes, only the play has to be about really boring stuff like financial statements and business plans. 

And imagine it from the board’s perspective, too! Even if all the Reallie Steilish directors are Eyelashes – or *especially* if they’re Eyelashes – it’s hard to just sit back and listen to the CEO tell you a bunch of super technical details about how well the corporation is performing.  It’s not that you don’t care, it’s just tedious! 

Anyway, in a lot of corporations, management presentations are mostly or entirely focused on explaining to the board what has happened since the last board meeting.  The fact that the last seventeen words of the previous sentence were copied and pasted from the definition of “pre-reads” should give you a sneaking suspicion that a lot of corporations are doing redundant work that’s probably not entirely necessary.