The Better Boards Podcast Series

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While we often think in terms of large, listed corporations, family firms account for some 70% of global GDP and 60% of global employment. They are key drivers of innovation, entrepreneurship, and long-term value creation, and effective governance of family firms warrants serious attention. 
In this podcast, Dr Sabine Dembkowski, Founder and Managing Partner, is joined by Prof. Dr. Philipp Hoog. Philipp is a Partner at BBE Handelsberatung, a leading German consultancy specialising in the retail sector, and Honorary Professor of Strategic Management at CBS International Business School in Cologne. He advises family-owned and founder-led businesses and investors on strategy, governance, transformation, and succession, with a particular focus on the role of advisory and supervisory boards in navigating disruption in retail. Philipp combines academic insight with hands-on experience from numerous board-related mandates and projects. He also serves as President of the EBS Alumni Association, representing graduates of EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht.
“In family business, it's not just the business sitting at the table, but also the family and the ownership, often embodied in the same people.“
Philipp notes that many of the world’s most successful companies are family-owned. Mars, Walmart, Aldi, Lidl, Peters Sports, and Samsung, to name a few. This makes governance more complex and personal, since any strategic advice must also consider family dynamics and generational concerns.
“The role of an advisory board in family businesses is something like a balancing act.”
For Philipp, advisory boards need to provide advice and control while considering the family interests. This can mean serving as a sparring partner, driving succession conversations, or diffusing emotional conflicts. At times, this requires a greater time commitment and investment in understanding the relationships than you would see at a non-family firm, to give appropriate advice and remain mindful of the dynamics.
“Boards, especially in family businesses, work well when there are three things in place.”
In Philipp’s experience, family boards need three things. The first is clear role separation, so family members understand when they are acting as shareholders vs family members or external stakeholders. The second is timely professional information about the business, ideally through structured reporting. The third is regularly scheduled, well-structured board meetings. To Philipp, three to four quality meetings per year, plus a strategy retreat, is ideal.
“A good advisory board doesn't restrict entrepreneurial freedom; it expands it.”
Philipp sees boards operating under two distinct models in family businesses. One is as an early warning system and strategic challenger. Another model is a board that oversees the company and monitors overall governance issues. 
A critical question is whether the company is playing to win or playing not to lose. Family-owned businesses can be reluctant to share authority and control, but a good board offers structure and support. Indeed, since family businesses often think in generations rather than quarters, partnering with board members who share the entrepreneurial DNA and bring a governance structure can be the key to more stable long-term growth. 
The three top takeaways from our conversation for effective boards are:
1.      Governance is not a luxury. It is a success factor, especially for family businesses. 
2.     Family ownership and business must be clearly separated in roles, in bodies, and in decisions. This creates professional governance. 
3.     The right board makes the difference. 

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Selecting the Chair: Governance Lessons from the US and the UK
Chair succession is handled differently in the US and the UK. However, both approaches have merit, and there are key principles that matter regardless of geography. 
In this podcast, Dr Sabine Dembkowski, Founder and Managing Partner, is joined by Susan Skerritt. Susan is a Non-Executive Independent Director on the boards of Citibank Europe PLC, Tanger, Inc., and IG Group PLC. She previously served on the boards of Royal Bank of Canada US Group Holdings, Community Financial Systems, Inc., VEREIT, and Falcon Trade Group. Before her Board career, she had a successful 35-year financial career and served as the Chairman, CEO, and President of Deutsche Bank Trust Company in the US. 
“Procedural differences reflect genuinely different governance philosophies.“
 
To Susan, the differences between the US and UK approaches reflect the differing philosophies at play. The US model is rooted in the idea that Boards are best positioned to govern themselves. So, the Board Chair is almost always selected from existing Directors, with the process managed internally. The Chair and CEO roles are often combined, and there is a deep resistance to “governance by checklist” regulations.
 
The UK model places greater weight on structural independence and investor accountability. The current code was built after corporate failures in the 80s and 90s and holds that self-governance without structural safeguards is insufficient. There are term limits, rules about external candidates, and separate CEO and Chair roles. It’s not wholly prescriptive, but “comply or explain” dominates.
 
“The strengths of one approach tend to illuminate the weaknesses of the other.”
 
In the US, Susan sees that internal candidates, who already know the company, its strategy, culture, and management team, can reduce transition risk. This is valuable in fast-moving situations and reduces search costs. Plus, internal candidates have established relationships and a track record with management that foster trust and candour from the start. The downsides are insularity, cultures of deference, and a lack of external benchmarking.
 
In the UK, those potential downsides are addressed. The formal process carries a mandate for independence from the new Chair and searches a wide talent pool for the best candidate to meet a carefully vetted list of needs. However, there’s a risk the search becomes an expensive, time-consuming theatre. There’s also transition risk if the new Chair can’t fully integrate with the company culture.
 
“Regardless of which governance tradition we're working within, there are three principles that matter.”
 
To Susan, three principles matter most. First, Boards should know what they need and not reach for what they’ve always had. The most common failure in Chair succession is a default to continuity. 
 
Second, process quality matters as much as outcome. Susan views this as the UK’s greatest contribution to the global governance conversation. A well-designed search process is rigorous, transparent, and defensible. It surfaces assumptions, creates a record, and signals to shareholders that the Board is taking the decision seriously. 
 
Third, succession planning is not an event. It's an ongoing discipline. Effective boards keep succession on the live agenda, actively managed and not derailed by unexpected departures. 
 
The three top takeaways from our conversation are:
 
1.    Structure matters, but it isn’t everything. The issue is always whether the Board is exercising genuine, independent judgment.
2.   The US and UK models are converging and getting better for it. 
3.   Chair succession is a government bellwether. 

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Chair succession is a pivotal moment for boards. It presents an opportunity to reflect on the organisation's future needs and steer it forward strategically. For this reason, organisations must proceed carefully in their Chair searches, eschewing the obvious in favour of what’s truly needed. 
In this podcast, Dr Sabine Dembkowski, Founder and Managing Partner, is joined by Louise Angel. Louise is Senior Managing Director at Teneo and a leading board headhunter, specialising in Chair and Non-Executive Director appointments for UK companies. She works closely with boards on succession planning, board composition and effectiveness, and complex and high-profile chair appointments. 
“Chair succession is one of those moments where you can genuinely change the trajectory of how a board operates.“
To Louise, while companies often refer to Chairs as “running” the board, the reality is much more subtle. Chairs set the tone for the quality of the debates, challenges, and discussions. High-quality conversations lead to higher perceptions of board effectiveness, CEOs feeling better supported, and stakeholders being happier and more engaged. For this reason, when succession comes up, it is a key moment to reflect on what the company needs for its next phase of evolution, and what an effective Chair would need to look like to support and lead that evolution.
“The Chair shouldn’t be choosing their own successor.”
 Ideally, Chair searches begin 18 to 24 months in advance. Louise notes that the conversation around succession planning is less awkward if it is a consistent agenda item. The Senior Independent Director (SID) is best suited to drive the conversation, and the board should also consider the timing of Chair succession with CEO transitions to avoid too much change at once.
"I would always encourage boards to challenge themselves on some of their assumptions. Do you really need someone who has chaired before or who has direct sector experience? Or are you potentially ruling out some very strong candidates by default?”
Louise notes that Chair succession is an inherently conservative process. This leads selection committees to choose people with traditional profiles and lean on prior experience as an easy proxy for suitability. However, by questioning assumptions and expanding the search pool, firms can go beyond the handful of people everyone is chasing to uncover other strong candidates who may be better suited for the firm’s unique needs.
“If you spend the time upfront getting as much clarity as possible on the necessary candidate skillset and profile, you increase your chances of a quick and clean process, which you will only have to run once.”
For Louise, investing extra time at the beginning to clarify must-haves, nice-to-haves, and wish lists reduces the overall length and complexity of the search. Support for the SID, a decision on internal vs. external candidate tracks, and keeping the process moving also improves the search experience. Louise further advises firms to remember that candidates are assessing them as well, so appearing well-organised and aligned during the search is an advantage. 
The three top takeaways from our conversation for effective boards are:
1.      See Chair succession as a real opportunity for strategic development and not just a tick-box process.
2.     Spend time getting the brief right.
3.     Run a process that is both rigorous and thoughtful. The mechanics matter, but so do the human dynamics — and it’s the combination of the two that leads to the best outcomes.

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We’d love to get to know you! If you’d like to become part of the Better Boards community, discover our unique approach, and explore ways to work with us or share your ideas on The Better Boards Podcast series, drop us a line at info@better-boards.com.

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Once boards prioritise managing geopolitical risk, how can they successfully move from diagnosing a problem to designing a plan of action?  
In this podcast, Dr Sabine Dembkowski, Founder and Managing Partner, is once again joined by Colin Reed, Chief Intelligence Officer at Clock&Cloud, a software startup transforming how large enterprises manage geopolitical risk.  Colin brings his experience as a US intelligence analyst and as the architect of Salesforce’s geopolitical risk management function to the conversation, revealing how boards and leadership teams can translate geopolitical complexity into actionable insights. 
“Building around competencies already in place is a much superior method to contracting for an external problem-solver to come in and do it on your behalf."
Colin recommends starting with an audit. No business is truly at zero when it comes to managing geopolitical risk. Find out which managers and functions are already managing risk at a tactical level and use them as building blocks. 
“This is the biggest failing of the current consulting-based approach to this problem - it assumes that what works for one company will work for another.” 
 Consultants and outside experts can be useful, but they are not always the best for managing geopolitical risks. Instead, Colin recommends bringing multiple functions together – legal, supply chain, procurement, marketing, security – to form a working group that meets quarterly. Share strategic insights, bring in current-events speakers or special-topic experts, and then start gathering knowledge about where risk is manifesting in each area to inform a highly customised, forward-looking view of the company’s true geopolitical risk profile. No outside consultant can replicate this kind of deep company understanding, and it becomes the foundation for meaningful mitigation and a true competitive advantage. 
“Identifying the internal fragility is the best way to focus attention on where global risk might actually break the company. If you don’t approach it this way, you spend all your time chasing the news cycle, which is broad and full of scary things, but only a few of which are probably truly scary to your firm.”
A firm’s unique risk profile is the best insurance against noise and unnecessary expense. Large firms can overspend on mitigation or miss a big risk and still survive. Mid-size and smaller firms don’t have that grace. Focusing on real, specific risks is a more affordable and sustainable model for closing the gap than worrying about everything.
“The institutional muscle needs to be there already and running all the time. If you wait until there are issues, the problems will be outsized compared to if you were able to detect them early.”
At a bare minimum, companies need to care about and prioritise geopolitical risk. A little time spent consistently beats out a crisis reaction, even if only partial solutions can be developed with the available resources. Systems, processes, and open lines of communication help all the time, and are especially valuable to have in place well in advance of a big crisis.
The three top takeaways from our conversation for effective boards are:
1.     Despite the number of people claiming to be experts, nobody has solved geopolitics completely. Experimentation and change will be necessary.
2.    Connect with industry peers to share best practices and learn.
3.    Board members should take an interest in history – there’s a sense we live in unprecedented times, but things have been chaotic before. Everyone benefits from the grounding historical perspectives provide. 

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We’d love to get to know you! If you’d like to become part of the Better Boards community, discover our unique approach, and explore ways to work with us or share your ideas on The Better Boards Podcast series, drop us a line at info@better-boards.com.

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Many boards treat geopolitics as background noise, leaving their companies exposed to unnecessary risk. Smart boards take a different approach, closing the gap and treating geopolitical risk with the same rigour as financial, cyber, and regulatory risks.
In this podcast, Dr Sabine Dembkowski, Founder and Managing Partner, is joined by Colin Reed. Colin is the Chief Intelligence Officer of Clock&Cloud, a software start-up transforming how large enterprises manage geopolitical risk.  Previously, Colin built Salesforce’s first-ever geopolitical risk management function, and before that, he was a senior intelligence analyst with the U.S. government. 
“Most of the business leaders we have today have had their entire careers in an unusual period of history.“
As Colin looks across history, he notes that the post-Cold War period was an unusually stable business climate. This led boards and C-suites to treat geopolitics as something governments must manage rather than their own business priority. However, as history reverts to its tumultuous norms, corporations must step back into taking an active approach to geopolitical risks.
“There’s nothing unavoidable about geopolitical risk. It very often telegraphs its approach.” 
Colin feels boards needn’t be surprised by geopolitical risk. Thanks to modern systems, it is easier than ever to model how risks can impact operations and the bottom line. Boards have learned to map and mitigate financial and cyber risks. They can learn to do the same with geopolitics, especially now that the tools exist to model even very complex situations quantitatively.
“To me, geopolitics is akin to the weather. It never goes away, and try as you might, you’ll eventually have to go outside in it.”
The best practices right now for closing the geopolitical risk gap are to stop treating geopolitics as ‘Act of God’ surprises and instead build a robust risk management framework around it. While there are many nuances to geopolitics, there are not so many that they can’t be mapped and modelled with the latest tools. Ideally, this is handled at the strategy level and should be forward-looking rather than backwards-looking or reactive. 
“I don’t think it’s sufficient to rely on a single board member, or an external advisor, to manage this problem, because doing so builds a single point of failure into the system.”
Colin feels that boards of large companies do best when they internalise the understanding that everyone must be aware of the need to track and manage geopolitical risk. This is especially true for European boards. Identifying a C-suite-level champion for geopolitical risk to build alignment across operations and identify gaps, and then investing strategically in solutions, is a cost-effective approach to building resilience. 
The three top takeaways from our conversation for effective boards are:
1.     Geopolitics can be understood and managed, and the expertise to do so already exists if you know where to look inside and outside your organisation. 
2.    Proactive engagement on geopolitics isn’t new. What’s happening now is a return to historical norms. 
3.    Quantitative metrics and modelling systems are about to revolutionise this field. 

Come Join The Better Boards Community 
We’d love to get to know you! If you’d like to become part of the Better Boards community, discover our unique approach, and explore ways to work with us or share your ideas on The Better Boards Podcast series, drop us a line at info@better-boards.com.