TRANSCRIPT
This is Matt Fullbrook. in my backyard in Toronto. Look, if you're seeing this, it means that you're taking some time to poke around Ground-Up Governance, which... thanks so much. I really thought it would be important every once in a while to check in with a video where first of all, I get to talk in a kind of unscripted way, this is the only place where you'll throughout the course of of experiencing Ground-Up Governance, and Sound-Up Governance and all the other stuff on the platform, this is the only time you'll actually get to see me and hear me express myself in my voice. And the other thing that I want to accomplish with these videos, which will probably come at once every two ish weeks, is I want to take the stuff that we're putting out on the platform, the written stuff, and the podcasts and so on, and try to give a little bit of context about who cares, right? What does this mean, this is especially important at the beginning, when some of the definitions are like, oh, yeah, okay, I get it. But how does this actually apply in a corporate governance context? Right? How do I apply this as an executive? Why does this matter to me in the boardroom? And I'm going to give a little bit of context in these videos, which will only be a few minutes, I'm trying to make everything as consumable and bite-sized as possible. But I want to try to use this, to engage you in a conversation about the "so what?" of all this and as we grow, and as the vocabulary gets bigger, and we work a little bit more through the definitions, these videos will be a little bit more tactical, and a little bit more rooted in specific examples. So that we can figure out exactly why this stuff matters in the real world. So getting to the stuff that we've already covered so far. First of all, I want to thank Nate Schmold, I want to thank Tiziana Casciaro, and Lisa Oldridge and Jamahl Evans for being the kind of guinea pigs and getting this off the ground. And, you know, I learned a lot, a lot of stuff that I didn't expect to Tiziana and Jamahl and Lisa, I know really well from before and from outside these interviews, and I kind of had an idea of what I was going to learn from them before I engaged in those conversations. And it turned out, it was really different than what I expected for a lot of reasons. But this is where the application I think gets really clear and really important. One of the expressions I hate the most when it comes to boards is the most important thing a board does is hire and fire the CEO. Because if we think about what we learned from Tiziana, that basically the implication behind it is that the board has authority to hire and fire CEO, but not really, it doesn't say anything about a board's power or but the importance of a board, having power and using it it to influence the people in its sphere. So let's imagine you hire a really good CEO. Wouldn't it be great for the board to play a role in creating the conditions where they can influence that CEO and support them? Thinking about their personality and their strengths, but also thinking about the things that maybe they're not so good at, and creating an environment where they can thrive, and then, in turn, have a power over the people in their sphere, and use that power to empower others to make the organization run really well. And so I like this idea that when we think about in a boardroom, there is a bit of this human context. And this applies in a really cool way to the conversation I had with Jamahl, right? Where you think about the influence that he ended up having over his superior officer just by expressing empathy, right? So this isn't power that he acquired through some kind of formal approach. This is just him being a human being and realizing that his superior needed support, needed space needed a friend, and then all of a sudden, they've got this relationship where Jamahl is able to have influence going upward just because he's a good person. And Lisa tells us that that human side has an influence over the actual value and performance of an organization. So all these pieces fit together in a really important way. And if you go back into your boardroom, whether you're an executive or a board member, and think about okay, well, our tendency in many cases is to think about corporate governance as almost equivalent to compliance: let's make sure that we're ticking all the boxes and monitoring the financials. And as long as we've got our butts covered, things are going to be fine. But the real power, the real…To use Lisa's term, “the jelly in the donut,” comes from the people and the way that we work together the brains and compassion and empathy and so on, that unlock the potential of the people around us. That's power, but it's also value creation. And it's also as we'll find out as we get more words in our in our vocabulary, It's also a really important key to good governance. So I'm going to get together with you every once in a while and do just sort of these unscripted, spontaneous spiels. But please reach out to matt@groundupgovernance.com. If you want to chat with me if you want to suggest ways that I can engage with you through these videos or otherwise, that can help to take the content of the platform and make it real and useful to you. Let me know we really want this to be as good and practical and useful as possible and we want for it to unfold in ways that you're going to find fun, but also that will make your life a little bit better. Thanks for watching. Thanks for checking in. Thanks for paying attention to Ground-Up Governance in its earliest days. I am really looking forward to staying in contact with you and seeing where this goes.
VIDEO: Matt's takeaways from the first few posts