In every organisation, there is a group to whom the organisation owes its existence. We often talk of the ‘owners’, since in a commercial organisation it is the owners, literally, who cause the enterprise to come into being and to have a particular purpose. But there is an equivalent group for every enterprise, commercial or…
Dissent v Consensus
Setting up for success really does start in the board room. Otherwise, chances are the entity will flounder at least, and founder at worst. More than that, a great board needs to be a great team. Achieving that is no mean feat and often calls for disagreement on complex issues – although, we hasten to…
Endless coffee is great – but endless time on planning, not so much
Balancing time allocated to board tasks is yet another challenge for the board that requires compromise – between enough attention to rightful detail, and tipping over into meddling in management, for example; or between devoting enough time to well-informed planning, and investing so much time that plans far outweigh results. For the board, governance and…
Getting to more than the sum of the parts
There are many organisations that have no legal obligation to follow this or that regime for corporate governance. But our question remains, why do it the hard way? Instead – after decades of high-profile corporate disasters – why not learn a lesson from the experience of others: it seems far better to choose proactively to report along…
Legislation implemented
Client: Board & Chief Executive Officer, Nature Conservation Trust of NSW A bespoke entity created under a specific piece of NSW legislation, the Nature Conservation Trust was established as an independent statutory body corporate, that also operated as a nonprofit organisation with deductible gift recipient status for tax purposes, pursuing objects in relation to nature conservation on…
Rectangles are not squares, and not all roles in decision making are decision making roles
The trick maths question back around mid-primary school is about squares and rectangles – both are defined by having four sides, two sets of parallel sides, and four corners of 90º. But squares have one more feature, crucial to the definition – all sides are the same length. So all squares are rectangles but not…
Clarifying consensus
Possibly the most frequent question put to us is “if we don’t have consent amongst the board, how can we move forward?” For the largest part, this speaks to a very common misunderstanding that we strike in our work – about the meaning of consensus in a decision making process. Part of the difficulty is…
Coffee on the road: count the cups!
We had the pleasure this week of receiving a whole bunch of nice messages from clients and colleagues on reaching a milestone to which many a small business aspires – 15 years of work together! It doesn’t seem that long until we take a look back over the kaleidoscope of projects that we have had…
Sabbatical postcard – board decisions, how hard can they be anyhow?
Today brings another round of ‘journalism’ telling us that we live in a time of more information than ever before, and yet more social media messages urging us to think there is no mystery that can’t be solved if we google it hard enough or crowd-source the problem to enough people in enough places. That’s…
Coffee on the road: Enough! on April fools day
In an era of populism writ large in global events, seen equally in ‘any-opinion-will-do-if-I-shout-it-loud-enough’ leadership and public debate that often seems to have only a passing acquaintance with facts and reasoned logic, many of our clients and colleagues on boards are facing quite tough times in holding the line on more mature and considerate leadership….
Sabbatical postcard – lies, damned lies and statistics v2.0
What the numbers really say is an issue at least as old as published statistics themselves, but one finding a renaissance in the world of the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016: ‘post-truth’.* Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a commercial organisation knows, for example, that it is possible to have both…
Coffee on the road – our word for the year
Big surprise – no, really, an actual surprise – our word for 2017 is not ‘coffee’! This year we are going public with our choice to applaud all those mature decision makers who know when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, and when to walk off into the sunset for the next challenge –…
Implementing legislation
Client: Board & Chief Executive Officer, Nature Conservation Trust of NSW Our new client is a bespoke entity – a statutory body corporate also operating as a nonprofit organisation with deductible gift recipient status for tax purposes. In a new direction for the organisation’s objects of nature conservation on private land, the organisation is now…
Coffee on the road – what a difference an accent makes!
We might not be much given to knitting our own yoghurt or weaving muesli here at ThinkEvans, but we are pretty darn serious about sustainability. For us its about being able to keep your promises to stakeholders – not just this week or next week, but next month and next year and the year after…