TRANSCRIPT:
MATT VOICEOVER
Welcome back to Sound-Up Governance. This is the third episode of our new revamped format. My name is Matt Fullbrook, and once again our featured guest is governance nerd, open finance specialist, funky mustache sporting genius, Andrew Escobar. You might notice that the illustration of Andrew in the episode thumbnail does not include include said mustache. Sorry about that. Anyway, board composition might be the most debated topic in corporate governance. What expertise and skills should we have in boardrooms? What about diversity? Board size? independence? To me, though, the most important and underexplored question here is what makes a director truly excellent? So I asked Andrew for his perspective.
MATT
What are one or two or however many you'd like to think of? What are the specific differences between. And this can be behavioral or skill or whatever, between someone who's a freaking amazing director and someone who's just filling a seat.
ANDREW ESCOBAR
It's never their expertise or their capabilities, their past experiences. It's almost always their curiosity that is the differentiator for me between a great director and an okay director. Curiosity, I think, is fundamentally, to me what drives good governance, great decision making. You're going to approach those conditions that you've talked about with curiosity. You're going to approach purpose with curiosity. And you're not going to get stuck on any one condition or purpose or value. You'll always be questioning it. And that, I think, requires curiosity.
MATT
So I just want to make an implicit thing explicit because to some people, I think they feel like as long as they're asking questions or worse, questioning everything - I think you understand the difference - that's a demonstration of curiosity. But that doesn't sound like what you're saying to me.
ANDREW ESCOBAR
Curiosity is not simply coming up with 20 questions or downloading 20 questions. Curiosity is getting answers to those questions, coming up with your own questions, having a conversation completely unrelated to your board, with a colleague or a friend. And then from that conversation, something sparks in you relevant to your board work, and you jot it down and you make sure that you follow up with that. That is curiosity. So it's not simply just having the questions, it's following through on them and getting to the bottom of the answer. Why did we do this 10 years ago? Because it's kind of impacting how we do things today. How does it shape our work now? What can we do different if we did this thing? How would that shape our results? Like, those are the kind of questions you need, but just I like to think myself, I like putting myself in the position sometimes of the receiving end of those questions. Your management team, your senior leaders, your CEO. A thousand questions aren't helpful either. You don't have time for a thousand questions. And so how do you how do you be a great editor to those questions?
MATT VOICEOVER
If you're a fan of my One Minute Governance podcast, you'll know that season four, which wrapped up in December, was all about questions that I believe boards should answer. And if you're really sharp, you'll have noticed that the questions I've been asking Andrew so far on this show have been some of the exact same ones I featured on OMG. It goes without saying that I'm delighted by Andrew's thoughts here that a director's job isn't about asking questions. Rather, a director may choose to ask questions in service of moving the board's thinking forward or finding a deeper truth, but not just for the sake of asking. In the next episode, I'll talk with Andrew about what it takes for a board to empower its directors to do the things we talked about today. You may already know that I'm creating some kind of original musical composition for each episode of this show. So as as usual, if you're interested in learning a bit more about today's music, there are some written notes at the end of the post. Thanks for listening. If you're enjoying the show, please spread the word.
MUSIC NOTES:
I sketched this one out on the Teenage Engineering OP-Z while on the balcony of my hotel room in Cancun during a rainstorm while I was at the America’s Credit Unions Board of Directors Conference. All of the drums and synths are on the OP-Z, which will be obvious to anyone who uses it because I’m using all the OG sounds. I added more bass using my Ernie Ball Music Man Stingray 5 (with rad snake-related artwork by Mathias Chau). There’s one synth lead line that I played on the Nord Lead A1. I forgot to include it in the thumbnail but the guitar is my old Fender Strat that I got as a teenager. For any guitar nerds, it’s a 1997/98 Strat Plus - the ball bearing nut version, not the roller nut - with Texas Special pickups in it.
Listening back, I realize this one is funky but probably a bit disorienting. It’b because there’s a pulse, but no real emphasis of the downbeat. If you’re having trouble, the whole thing is in 3/4 (I’m thinking of it as having swung 16th notes), the very first kick drum is “on the one” and the little shaker sound is on every “and”…or eighth note offbeat.
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