News
The post-pandemic board
What does a post-pandemic corporate board look like?
That was the central question at a panel discussion that helped kick off Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference in Laguna Niguel, California, this week. During an hour-long discussion moderated by Ruth Umoh, leadership editor, some clear themes emerged.
The post-pandemic board is more aware of the demand for diversity, and looking for directors who have a wide range of inherent (gender, race, age) and acquired (professional skills) qualities. It is also awake to the major forces that are constantly reshaping the world and not beholden to the traditions of the past.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the panellists. (These comments have been lightly edited.)
Recruitment is key to diversity strategy.
As boards continue to grapple with diversifying their ranks, it’s a mistake to overemphasize recruiting members with CEO and CFO experience—that often narrows the field to mostly white men, while excluding key skills like cyber expertise and talent management. “Doesn’t a great CEO build a great team of people who have subject matter expertise that complements yours?” said Lanaya Irvin, CEO of Coqual, a nonprofit think tank and advisory group focused on equity in the workplace. “It’s odd that corporate America is plagued by stale definitions of leadership.”
The pandemic raised board expectations.
“Customers saw that necessity is the mother of invention. They saw new things. They saw how quickly it could happen. They saw the innovation, the art of the possible. And that expectation continues,” said Pam Fletcher, board member at Lumentum and a former executive at General Motors. “Boards need to be articulate in talking about enabling technologies that companies need to have so that they know they’re playing forward, and they’re not investing on the back end of trends.”
Boards should not run away from AI, nor should they underestimate its impact.
“Think about it much the way you think about other very challenging topics, where it’s eating the elephant one bite at a time,” said Jameeka Green Aaron, chief information security officer, customer identity at Okta, a data security company. She warned that it was crucial companies take care of details like making sure their data and intellectual property are not on the internet to be used by existing AI models. But she added it’s important to think big picture about the transformative technology. “The cardinal sin that I would not want any of us to commit is to kind of think ‘Oh, this will be in some ways like the cloud on steroids,’ and that it will disrupt the way we think about our tech stack, rather than disrupt the way we think about the world,” she said.
The most dangerous risks to companies are hiding in plain sight.
Citing a classic Monty Python joke, Liza Landsman, CEO of Stash, a fintech company, and a board member at Squarespace, Choice Hotels, and Applause, said “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
“I did not expect the pandemic,” she said, “but now we all have to constantly be challenging ourselves, our executives, and our boards to think about the risks that have become so much of the fabric of our daily lives that we ignore them. Those are the big risks that get you.”
The Most Powerful Women Summit continues today and tomorrow. If you’re not attending in person, you can still follow the rest of the event on Fortune.com, on social media, and on our livestream of the event here.
Lila MacLellan | [email protected] | @lilamaclellan