VIDEO: Update from Matt Fullbrook

TRANSCRIPT

Hey everybody, this is Matt Fullbrook. We're about a week in since the launch of Ground-Up Governance and about a week away from when content is going to start rolling out on a regular basis. I am so grateful to all of you who've been following along, and especially to those of you who have subscribed. And you know, I want to cover one of the things that I'm getting asked more and more frequently, especially now that I'm putting more of my own stuff out there. People ask me a lot: "what are the corporate governance resources that you should be checking out to make sure that you are as up to date as possible on what's going on and as effective as you can be as an executive or corporate director?" And honestly, it's not a very easy answer for me. I mean, I look at the resources that are out there that are directly related to governance, and there's some super cool stuff. I'm thinking about How Boards Work by Dambisa Moyo, or the Imperfect Board Member by Jim Brown, or other cool things that are out there that you'll just find if you search Amazon, or Google for "corporate governance books," but honestly, most of that stuff's not really going to teach you what an awesome board looks like. And the reason is that most of this stuff is really hard to quantify and really hard to express. But this is one of the things that I really like about my definition of corporate governance as being "the way that decisions get made in an organization" and the definition of good governance being "actively creating the conditions that are most likely to result in effective decisions," which is there's a lot of really useful practical science around decision making and around the way that decisions get made in groups and around behavioral science and so on. So I would recommend that you check out a lot of different stuff on decision science, check out Philip Tetlock check out, András Tilcsik from Rotman, check out Katy Milkman, check out all kinds of different people who are out there studying decisions. If you don't like all the academic stuff, then maybe check out there's a really great book a couple years ago by a guy named David Epstein called "Range" which is all about expertise and check out the book "Decisive" by Chip and Dan Heath, where they talk about some of the biases and conditions that get in the way of effective decision making. And maybe most of all, have a look at I keep this on my shelf at the office is a book called "Thing Explainer" by Randall Munroe. And one of the things that I find gets in the way of my ability to create the conditions for good decisions is when I use a lot of jargon or big words and stuff that people don't understand. This was the actual origin of Ground-Up Governance, where it came from, what it was inspired by. In "Thing Explainer" what he does is he has a detailed kind of like a blueprint type drawing of a complex thing. The first one is the International Space Station. And there's a bunch of little descriptions of how different parts of it work and how the whole thing works and what it is using only the 1000 most common words in the English language. So really what it is it's evidence, because I guarantee most of the stuff that you're going to have to explain in your boardroom is less complex than the International Space Station, or a submarine or a nuclear reactor. And this is proof that with a good illustration, and a small number of common words, you can explain something really complex in a way that anyone can understand even someone who doesn't know anything about the subject. And this type of clear, universally understandable communication goes a long way to creating the conditions where effective decisions are most likely to happen. So instead of just focusing on books that have "board" or "corporate governance" in the title, go out and have a look and explore the stuff that that's out there around good communication and decision making. And that'll help to supercharge your effectiveness in the boardroom. We're going to start dropping content at least twice a week on Ground-Up Governance starting on September 26, so sign up now. There's going to be lots of new stuff beginning next week and get in touch with me anytime matt@groundupgovernance.com. I'd love to hear what you have to say and any suggestions you have or questions that you'd like us to cover. Definitely let me know and we'll get on it. Thanks so much for following along everyone.