Articles written By Better Boards

The First 90 Days - Making It The Key To Your Success

Every CEO, Chair and Director who joins an organisation has the potential to make a significant contribution to the organisation’s mission, and every joining leader has hopes and dreams of being a force for good. What is challenging but true is that the success or failure of this new marriage between leader and organisation will be heavily influenced by what happens in those first few months. Whether it is an external or an internal hire, those notorious first 90 days lay the seeds for success, failure or stumbling.

Better Boards Conference 2018

Building Your Governance & Strategy Toolkit

Boards and directors often understand the theory of governance, but its practical application in the boardroom remains a challenge. This is because many boards lack the pragmatic tools and processes to document and implement robust modern governance processes in their boardroom. In this webinar Michael will discuss and provide practical examples across a range of areas (governance, strategic planning, strategic business development and mergers and amalgamations) showing how, using a range of simple but powerful tools, your Board can quickly and easily improve and streamline their governance.

Director Financial Literacy

Each individual director is required by law to be able to ‘read and understand financial statements’. But how much does each individual director without an accounting background need to know to meet this legal threshold, and how does a director know if he or she has the requisite capability for monitoring their organisation’s finances? To help directors answer these questions researchers at Queensland University of Technology have developed a competency framework for director financial literacy and a simple online test for assessing whether directors are financially literate.

How to Get Your Alliances Off the Ground

Adapting to deregulation of markets for government funded service delivery is one of the greatest challenges for Not-for-Profit (NfP) providers at present. The shift to consumer driven markets combined with the funding squeeze being felt in all parts of the sector has many Boards and leadership teams questioning the future viabilities of their organisations. Innovation solutions to these challenges often requires funding and resources that are beyond most NFPs. Some organisations are discovering that the answer lies in what NFPs have in the past found a natural fit – working and collaborating together.

Build an Effective Board: Practical & Actionable Tips

Having seen the good, the bad and the ugly from many not-for-profit (NFP) boardrooms we’ve picked up plenty of the best (and worst) practices for improving how your NFP board operates. From how to build a director recruitment “machine” to how to make your meetings more effective, we’ll unpack and share lots of practical tips and insights during this webinar. Put your best foot forward with a tool kit of immediately actionable tips to make your board better.

Co-designing Your New Business Model

For boards of community businesses (NFPs) the move to a customer-driven, competitive marketplace is a radical departure from their known industry/sector context to which they and their management team were perfectly adapted. An old business model cannot operate in a new paradigm. Co-designing a new business model is mission critical, trying to hang on to your existing business model is a death knell; the rules and processes that supported the old business model will be defunct.

Directors' Duties: Lessons from the past to guide future conduct

It is said that those who fail to learn the lessons from mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat those mistakes. Another saying often attributed to Einstein is that the definition of insanity is doing exactly the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. In this webinar you will learn about: Directors’ and Committee Members’ duties to their organisations (both companies limited by guarantee and incorporated associations).

The Board's Role in Strategic Transformation

For boards, chief executive officers and executives of community businesses (NFPs) the move to the customer-driven, competitive marketplace is a radical departure from their known industry/sector context. Planning and executing a strategic transition of one’s organisation, a re-engineering of the business model and a reinvention of the culture is a very significant and complex project that many leaders need to undertake. Coming to grips with the realities and practicalities of such a project can be daunting, to say the least.

The Board Portal: An essential part of your boardroom?

The adoption of online board portals is part of a growing trend of embracing e-governance in both non-profit and corporate boardrooms. The expanded use of technology in the boardroom can be very cost-effective, boost efficiency and is a real time-saver for both board members and support staff. It also opens up in-your-own-time opportunities for directors to communicate and collaborate outside of board meetings. This article will hopefully clarify how board portals work, and help you to make a more informed decision about whether your organisation could benefit from a greater use of technology in the boardroom.