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The Corporate Director Podcast
Inside Wall Street Journal's Top 250 Directors List
00:32:43
This episode of the Corporate Director Podcast features Alan Murray discussing the Wall Street Journal's recent release of the Top 250 Board Directors List. Murray digs into how the list was created, what criteria really make a great board director,...
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- [00:00]
Dottie Schindlinger
Foreign.
- [00:09]
Podcast Narrator
Welcome to the Corporate Director Podcast where we discuss the experiences and ideas behind what's working in corporate board governance in our digital tech fueled world. Here you'll discover new insights from corporate leaders and governance researchers with compelling stories about corporate governance strategy, board culture, risk management, digital transformation and more.
- [00:34]
Dottie Schindlinger
Hi everybody and welcome back to the Corporate Director Podcast, the voice of modern governance. My name is Dottie Schindlinger, executive director of the Diligent Institute and I'm joined once again by my co host with the co most Megan Day, strategy leader here at Diligent. Megan, how are you doing today?
- [00:51]
Megan Day
Dottie I am doing great and I am particularly looking forward to today's interview with with Alan Murray. We are diving into a new partnership with the Wall Street Journal to spotlight the top public company directors.
- [01:05]
Dottie Schindlinger
Yeah, Megan, we're so excited about this new relationship with the Wall Street Journal. I mean we, we've had some work in the past with Alan when he was with Fortune, and now we're really excited to continue that relationship with him. You know, we, we did this report together, I should say, really, they published this report on the top 250 board directors looking at public company directors. But they leveraged our data, our diligent market intelligence data to come up with that list. And it was really looking at directors in the S&P 500. So kind of looked at a broad set of directors, ranked them based on different sets of criteria, you know, and I was really interested to sort of figure out like how many of them are Diligent customers. I found out that all but eight.
- [01:44]
Megan Day
Hey, all but eight of that 250.
- [01:47]
Dottie Schindlinger
Use some part of the Diligent product, Ecosphere. So I was really excited to see that. And by the way, that wasn't intentional, folks. That was just a happy accident. So I was excited to see that.
- [01:57]
Megan Day
I love that, Dottie. And we love outstanding standing directors. But I want to take us on a little bit of a tangent, a related tangent before we get into our conversation with Alan. And I want to talk about no votes. No vote campaigns are really no longer the nuclear option. I think in 2025 we are seeing they're becoming the new normal. We've seen some big headlines coming out of Netflix that their lead director outed for a no confidence vote. There were over 40 of them this proxy season alone. And you know, it's really, really interesting. It's not necessarily about performance anymore. In the Netflix case, it seems to be about attendance, which is, which is interesting. But the campaigns themselves are being driven by a mix of things like executive pay, lack of responsiveness to shareholder demands, you know, even the thou who should not be named esg. I. I'd love to get your take on this. Do. Are we, you know, witnessing a shift in how boards are being held accountable?
- [03:03]
Dottie Schindlinger
I think we are. I mean, well, well, first of all, there's a couple things at play, right? And, and I'm going to take you back in time, Megan, for I think it was two years ago now or three years ago when you and I had a couple of episodes of the podcast talking about the new universal proxy card and we talked about the fact that they had done away with the slate of directors. And now you, you vote on each director individually. And I. And we thought that first year we were going to just see a sea change in board membership. Well, we were off by a couple years. But guess what? I think we're there, folks. I think now that change is really showing us that shareholders are paying a lot more attention to the goings on of individual directors and they're realizing that their power extends to holding individual directors more accountable for what's happening at the board level. They don't have to just reject the whole slate or approve the whole slate. They can be much more selective. And that gives them a new tool, particularly I would say, shareholder activists. It gives them a new tool to think differently and maybe a little bit more surgically about how they approach board quality. So I think we're there. I think we're finally seeing the outcome of that.
- [04:15]
Megan Day
Yeah, it's really interesting. This was from an article in Agenda, and they cited a survey recently conducted by ey nearly half of the institutional investors they surveyed, which was like trillions of dollars in assets under management. Those investors see no vote campaigns as the preferred way now to drive change.
- [04:35]
Dottie Schindlinger
Super, super interesting. And that is new. I mean, I, I remember even as, as recently as three years ago, we were still seeing kind of the average approval rating on board elections was like north of 97%. That was the average. And I think it's really fascinating. That average has been trending downward not because there's so many directors being voted up, but because there are some. And so again, let's be, let's be clear, like, this is not like the majority of directors getting voted out of their seats. That's not the case. But what is happening is we're seeing it as a more common approach to these campaigns to really, you know, again, another tool in the arsenal for activists and for shareholders to hold directors accountable. And honestly, Megan, every road points to the same direction for me. And that is it's getting harder to be a good director. It's just getting harder and harder. So, directors, we feel you. Hats off to you. Thanks for doing good work. Keep it up. You're doing good and we're there with you. We know it's a hard job and it's only going to get harder from here. Megan, say something hopeful.
- [05:38]
Megan Day
I don't know that I have anything hopeful because I'm certainly not going to become a public company board member anytime soon. As much as hundreds of thousands of dollars and, you know, interesting conversations dangled in front of me may happen. I don't know. It's a, it's tough work if you can get it.
- [05:58]
Dottie Schindlinger
Well, what I will say is I was thrilled to have the chance to talk to Alan Murray, though, because what we were talking about was honoring the top 250 directors. So those directors who again, on this set of data driven criteria, rose to the top. Now, as he and I both reflect on in our conversation, it's all data driven. There's no sort of like human overlay on that. And so sometimes the data points in a direction and you look at that director and think, yeah, but they're on the board that did X. And so what does that mean? But I think it is helpful and interesting to take a look at a fully data driven model, see how people are stacking up and ranking, and then take a look at those that really rose to the top and figure out what are they doing differently, what are some of the things that they are doing that are unique. And so I had the opportunity to talk to Alan about that, and I'm excited to share that conversation with you. Great.
- [06:49]
Megan Day
Let's give it a listen.
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Dottie Schindlinger
Joining us on the Corporate Director podcast today is Alan Murray. Alan is the founding president of the Wall Street Journal's Leadership Institute. He's also the former CEO of Fortune Media. Alan sits on the boards of C3AI and the committee to Protect Journalists, and he's an executive fellow at the Yale School of Management. And Alan, welcome back to the podcast.
- [07:18]
Alan Murray
Dottie, thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here.
- [07:21]
Dottie Schindlinger
Well, I'm, I'm always thrilled to have you here. Alan and I just rattled off a few things you're doing, but you've done so much more than that. And for those that don't have the pleasure of knowing you, would you share just a little bit more about your career background? Because I think it's always such a fascinating story.
- [07:34]
Alan Murray
Oh, my goodness. Well, let me, let Me make sure and give you the short version. I mean, I've. I've only done a lot because I've been around for a long time. And if you're around long enough, you do a lot of. I started as a journalist when I was 9 years old. Created a little neighborhood newspaper that I sold for a nickel. Edited my high school newspaper, college newspaper, went to work for my hometown newspaper, all those things that journalists do. But started at the Wall Street Journal at a pretty young age, spent quite a few years, then went to cnbc, ran their Washington bureau for a while, came back to the Wall street journal, and then 10 years ago, went to Fortune, first as editor in chief, then and then as CEO, and I returned to the Wall Street Journal in September of last year.
- [08:17]
Dottie Schindlinger
That's so exciting, Alan. I'm glad to have you back and I'm glad that we get to keep working with you, because I know we got a chance to work with you when you were at Fortune, too. I want to talk a little bit about a project that we both, I think, care deeply about that just came out not too long ago. And that was the top 250 board directors list. And that was a special report that came out of the Journal. And, you know, Diligent was delighted to be able to contribute some of the data for the report. So let's just start with the basics. I mean, what was the INS inspiration behind the project and what were you hoping that it would achieve?
- [08:46]
Alan Murray
Look, I think the last five years have shown us that, that the pace of change in business is just unprecedented. It's unlike anything we've ever experienced before. If you think about the pandemic and everybody having to go home and then trying to get everybody back and George Floyd and all the employee uprising around that, the invasion of Ukraine, companies had to drop. Drop their Russian business. And then, of course, the big one in November of 2022 was the introduction of Gen AI. And just to continue the story, I remember very clearly In November of 2022, people said, oh, we may be only a decade or two away from artificial general intelligence. Today, people are measuring that not in years or decades, but in months. So it's just been an extraordinary period. And that creates a continuous learning challenge for all of us, but particularly for the people who are leading large organizations. And what we try to do at the Leadership Institute is create opportunities to help them keep up with those events through peer learning, peer sharing, peer exchange.
- [09:53]
Dottie Schindlinger
Well, I was really fascinated to see the list come out. And I think one of the things I really appreciated was that you introduced us to Rick at Bendable Labs. You know, we had the opportunity to work with this great independent third party. Let's talk a little bit about the methodology behind the list because I think a lot of people are kind of curious as to, well, how did you come up with the ranking and how did you decide, you know, who were top directors? What was the criteria? So let's get into the methodology a little bit and talk about how that came about.
- [10:19]
Alan Murray
Yeah, well, you have to start with the ranking of the companies that they're leading. I mean, we're giving directors credit, particularly in a tumultuous time like this. For companies that are well run, the directors deserve some degree of the credit. And so the first thing about getting a prominent spot on the list is being the director of a company that's doing well. And Bendable, as you know, created a ranking that's been in the journal for the last nine years called the 250 best managed companies. That's built around the principles of Peter Drucker in terms of measuring companies. Then beyond that, I, I think Bendable looked at are you on the board or are you running one of the key committees? Extra credit for running key committees, extra credit for being on two or three large company boards. It's 100% data driven. There was no editorial thumb on the scale. It was, you know, we came up with the criteria and then we let the data tell us where to go.
- [11:18]
Dottie Schindlinger
Well, I thought it was also really interesting and helpful too, Alan, because when that list came out, you wrote a really great article to kind of come out as a companion piece with that about what makes a director great. Right. Because of course it's data driven. But that doesn't necessarily always tell you the full story. So what were some of the key ideas and insights that you shared in that article?
- [11:38]
Alan Murray
Well, this is really us, the inspiration for creating a board council. This was really part of it. I mean, people think director seats are kind of cushy jobs. You, for these big companies, you get paid pretty well. It could be 200, 300, $400,000. You only go to three or four meetings a year, maybe a couple of calls for committee meetings. And what I wrote in that piece was in normal times it is a pretty cushy job. But none of us live in normal times. And, and when stuff happens, when things start to fall apart, it's ultimately the directors that are responsible. They're the ones who have to decide, gee, it's time to replace the CEO. That's the ultimate decision. But take a look around. I mean, that's a decision that gets made pretty often these days. And so our feeling was the job in these tumultuous times is becoming more important. It requires much more knowledge about a wider array of things than it did 10, 20, 30 years ago. And directors need help keeping up with it. I mean, the truth is, I mean, you know, one question that you and I could talk about is, do we pick directors in the right way? Because most of the directors on that list are, you know, have been around for a while. They're not, they're not young, you know, they're not spring chickens. And, and that can create its own learning challenges. But in any event, the people who are there are there because they know how to ask the right questions, but they still require some modicum of information. So our hope is that this Directors Council can help them keep abreast of the rapidly moving events in AI or in geopolitics or in policy.
- [13:19]
Dottie Schindlinger
You know, you mentioned the Directors Council and I want to give you an opportunity here because I'm not sure we did a great job of explaining what that is. Do you mind just taking a second and talking a bit about that?
- [13:27]
Alan Murray
Well, the whole Leadership Institute is built on the notion that the way you keep up with events in these rapidly changing times is through peer sharing, peer learning, peer engagement. And we do that for CEOs, we do it for CFOs, we do it for CMOs, we do it for CIOs. Now we're going to do it for directors. And what that means is we'll have numerous meetings over the course of the year, but a summit in November where we are going to bring anywhere from 100 to 150 of the top directors together to focus on some of these issues and the board's role in these issues. Take AI, for instance. On the one hand, there are a number of risks posed by AI to data protection or intellectual property protection that boards have to watch out for. But there's also a very big existential risk that if you don't move quickly enough, somebody else is going to get there before you do and disrupt your whole business and your whole business model. So how do directors, they don't have to be experts, but how do directors know enough to ask the right questions and to monitor whether their company is where it needs to be in that rapidly evolving landscape?
- [14:37]
Dottie Schindlinger
Such important questions. And I know, Ellen, we're really excited at Diligent because we're going to be there at the event sort of be a part of that. So, really excited to have those conversations. I want to go back now for a second to talk a bit more about director quality. I feel like this is something so many people have tried so hard over the years to get a good network measure, good set of metrics around. What are the indicators that tell you whether a director's performance is good, bad or, or ugly? What are your thoughts about that? I mean, I know we have all the data that went into the report, but you know, how measurable is director quality anyway? I mean, there's some things that are kind of, you know, squishy.
- [15:10]
Alan Murray
It's tough. Yeah, it's tough. And, and first of all, thank you and thank Diligent for being a major source of the data that went into the ranking. And there were some things you could look at in terms of, you know, whether they're, were whether there have been any SEC filings or complaints or suits, that sort of thing. So there is some objective data. But I think at the end of the day, what we, what Bendable concluded in putting together the algorithm to calculate this is we're trying to show you who the powerful and prominent directors are not necessarily the best. We don't always know that they're the best. And, and I'm not dissing this particular director, actually. I know her and quite fond of her. But Robin Denholm, who is the lead director at Tesla, you have to raise a question over whether the directors of Tesla have been doing their job over the course of the last two years when. Or they'll just take the last six months when Elon Musk has been spending all this time in Washington focusing on the government, you know, being involved in some fairly controversial antics that actually hurt the sales of the company and not spending a lot of time on the company which, which is struggling. So I think there are moments like that where director quality is less about expertise, less about background or training, more about do you have the courage and the presence of mind and the judgment to do what needs to be done to get companies back on track when they start to get close to the edge of the rails?
- [16:46]
Dottie Schindlinger
Well, I have a follow up question there, Alan, because are there some common misconceptions about what makes a good director? I mean, there are, there are things that you hear that kind of, you know, raise up in the ranking of this is a good director, but it might not be true.
- [16:59]
Alan Murray
I think maybe so. I mean the number one thing you hear here, and you know this, Dottie, the first thing you'll hear if you go, and if somebody tells you they're looking for a new director, and here's what I want, they'll tell you they want somebody who has been in the CEO chair. Now, there are problems with that. One problem is you by definition, lack diversity if you ask that question, because 90% of big company CEOs are men, and the vast, vast majority of those men are white men. And so you're missing a lot of perspectives if you just keep going back to the same pool over and over again to, to feed your board. I understand the instinct, you know, if you're a CEO, you want somebody who's, it's a, it's a unique kind of job. You want somebody who's been in the job and understands it. But, but I think in order to succeed in this rapidly changing world that we're in, people have to widen the aperture. Think of other types of talent. You need, you need people who have good judgment. You know what's interesting about this? One of the things I said in that piece I wrote for the journal, I said directors are, directors are the ultimate human in the loop. They are the people who have to, you know, when, when things are running smoothly, they just smile and watch it happen. But when they aren't running smoothly, they're the ones who have to have the judgment and the courage to step in and say, whoa, wait a minute, the machine's going a little off track here. We need to correct. And so it's those qualities. You want some experience, you want some judgment, and you want some courage and kind of this odd mixture of humility and arrogance. You have to have enough humility to, you know, not be compelled to get involved when you don't need to get involved, but enough courage to get involved when you smell something's amiss.
- [18:43]
Dottie Schindlinger
Those are all some really important points and hard to find in data.
- [18:48]
Alan Murray
Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. So I think we'll continue to try and improve our algorithms and we can work together to find better data. But I think we've got a good first start here. What we know is the 250 people on this list are really important in the world of business right now because they're making the, a lot of the key decisions that will determine what business looks like 5, 10, 15 years down the road.
- [19:14]
Dottie Schindlinger
I wonder, Alan, how long it will be before some AI shows up on the list of best directors or top directors.
- [19:21]
Alan Murray
Yeah, why not? Why, why shouldn't, why shouldn't you have an agent on the. I mean, there's already a company. What's it called? Inception. That's making a board tool, AI tool to help assist in the boardroom. Have you played with it at all? I haven't, but not with that one.
- [19:41]
Dottie Schindlinger
But I mean, Diligent is doing the same. We've got, we've got.
- [19:44]
Alan Murray
You're doing the same thing. Sorry, no, I cited a competitor. Oh, bad on me, but yeah, I can't imagine, you know, where I find Genai most useful is when you're dealing with a broad range of knowledge and you need it to be synthesized quickly. I use it a lot for that, and I can imagine boards finding that very valuable.
- [20:09]
Dottie Schindlinger
Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about the concept of a good board director and how that's changed over time. I mean, I think that over time there's been a desire for different skills or qualities that are becoming more important. Give us some reflection on just how that that's changed over the years.
- [20:25]
Alan Murray
Well, when I first started covering this stuff, being a CEO was probably one of the. Was close to being a tenured college professor. It was one of the safest jobs you could have. You know, you could sit there and last for a long time before they replaced you. And there were were a series of events in the 80s and 90s that really changed that dramatically. You had the rise of activist shareholders, the rise of private equity, the corporate raiders going after companies that weren't performing well. And all of a sudden, directors realized. And then at the turn of the century with WorldCom and so forth, directors were actually getting sued personally for the poor performance of their companies. And all of a sudden, boards woke up and realized, if we don't do our jobs, we could be in serious trouble here. And so you had in, after the turn of the millennia, real increase in the activity of boards. And I think that changed. That changed the fundamental characteristics they realized they really do make. They are the ultimate humans in the loop. They do make the final decisions. They have to be qualified. Then I think we kind of went through a period where boards would sit there and do these skill matrix and say, well, I need somebody who's an expert in cyber security and some. But somebody who's an expert in AI. And I need a geopolitical expert and I need. And at some point you realize that the threats were so diverse, your board wasn't big enough to have an expert in each of those things. So I feel like we're going a little bit deeper back now to the, geez, how do I get somebody who is worldly, has good judgment, has lots of Experience, knows how to write, ask the right questions, and has the, the, the humility to stay out of things when they don't need to be in things and the courage to step in when they, they need to step in. Now that's, that's taken people back to this notion. Well, that has to be a former CEO. Well, there got to be other people out there who can do that, who aren't former CEOs for sure.
- [22:15]
Dottie Schindlinger
I mean, there's lots of other roles that require good judgment, right? Not just the CEO chair. But speaking of CEOs for a moment, you know, it's always really fascinating. We had the opportunity just recently on the podcast to talk to the team at PwC that puts out that great survey every year from the C Suite on board effectiveness. And this year was really stark. You know, in this year's edition, only 35% of those surveyed think the board is doing a good or excellent job. That's the lowest it's ever been. And meanwhile, 93% of them said at least one director on their board should be replaced, which is an all time high. So I, I want to talk a little bit about this issue of measuring director quality and kind of what it looks like from the CEO chair and just what you make of those findings. Like why is there this kind of disconnect happening between the C Suite and the board? And what might that say about director quality?
- [23:03]
Alan Murray
Well, in my experience, you have different CEOs who take very different approaches to this. There's some CEOs who don't care. They view the board more as a threat than as a resource. And so if the, if the board is, you know, not that experienced and getting a little long in the tooth, but is going to support the CEO, they may be inclined to leave them in place. I think the smarter CEOs recognize that given the pace of change we were talking about earlier, you need all the help you can get and you better have smart people on the board who, who can help you. So I think a lot of it, you know, maybe it shouldn't, maybe it should depend more on the Nom and Gov committee, but I think a lot of it depends on the CEO. How does the CEO use the board? Is he looking for a board that's just going to keep him or her in place, or is he or she looking for a board that's really going to add power?
- [24:00]
Dottie Schindlinger
That's great. Any sort of best and final thoughts on director quality before we shift gears?
- [24:06]
Alan Murray
No, I. The, I guess the, I'm trying to think of the right way to say this. I've been a journalist my whole life. I've always asked questions. That's what I do for a living. I am stunned in the boardrooms I've been in at the deficiency, the reluctance to ask tough questions. So I'm not saying this is what most CEOs look for when they have board members, but what I would be looking for is people who are willing to ask the tough questions. I mean, to me, that's qualification number one.
- [24:36]
Dottie Schindlinger
So more journalists on boards.
- [24:38]
Alan Murray
It would not be a bad thing. It would annoy the hell out of the, out of the CEOs and maybe the boards, but it would not be a bad thing.
- [24:46]
Dottie Schindlinger
Well, Alan, before we let you go, there are three questions we like to ask every guest that joins us on the podcast. Okay, so the first one is, what do you think will be the biggest difference between boardrooms today and 10 years from now?
- [24:58]
Alan Murray
Oh, I think it will definitely be the introduction of AI. It's just the, the use of AI to answer questions, provide guidance, provide the first round recommendations is increasing so fast, and that will have to transform boardrooms the way it's transforming everything else.
- [25:15]
Dottie Schindlinger
I couldn't agree more. You're a great person to ask. This next question. What's the last thing that you read or watched or listened to or maybe I'll even say wrote that made you think about governance in a new light?
- [25:28]
Alan Murray
I just read there's a brand new book that came out this week, actually. I'm gonna struggle a little bit. It was written by a couple of Europeans. I'm gonna struggle a little bit to get the name, but I'll give it back to you so you can put it in, in the show notes. But they looked at the most spectacular business scandals of the, of the last 25 years of the current millennium. Theranos, Uber. They looked at Volkswagen, they looked at Boeing. You know, said, how, how did good people and good companies end up doing such bad things? First of all, it's a very interesting question. I'm not sure they perfectly answered it, but I do think they gave some important guidelines on how to avoid having your company follow the same path.
- [26:14]
Dottie Schindlinger
Well, Ellen, last question for you is what is your current passion project?
- [26:18]
Alan Murray
Oh, my current passion project. So it's the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute. I mean, look, this is my legacy project. I think everything we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes shows that the problem that society faces over the next couple of decades is not a technology problem, it's a people problem. It's a culture problem. It's a leadership problem. And if we can create something here at the WSJ Leadership Institute that can help leaders figure out how to adapt to that technology, adopt that technology, create resilient cultures and organizations that can survive this tidal weight of change, we will have done something important. And I can feel proud of this final act in my career.
- [27:05]
Dottie Schindlinger
Well, Alan, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It's been so great to speak with you again.
- [27:10]
Alan Murray
Dottie, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
- [27:13]
Dottie Schindlinger
We've been joined today by Alan Murray, the founding president of the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute and the former CEO of Fortun. Alan, thank you so much for being on the show.
- [27:21]
Alan Murray
Thank you.
- [27:30]
Megan Day
I absolutely love Alan's candor. Gotti. He is always such a breath of fresh air when I speak with him.
- [27:38]
Dottie Schindlinger
You know, it is great, right? You talk to someone who's been a journalist for that long, he's gonna have a take on any topic you throw at him.
- [27:46]
Megan Day
Well, and also he notes the end of career attitude. I think he has zero beep it out to give, you know.
- [27:56]
Dottie Schindlinger
Yeah, I think you might be right. There's definitely kind of a low BS threshold for Alan Murray these days. You know, I also, I also have to say, I want to go and read this book that he mentioned, the dark pattern where he was, you know, talking about the big business scandals of the last 25 years. It reminded me a lot of that modern governance report that we did years ago where we looked at, you know, big mishaps by some of the same companies by, you know, vw, by Boeing, by some others, and trying to understand what went wrong at the board level that may have contributed to those implosions and the sort of, you know, what was the company performance? I think there's so much to be gained by looking at examples of companies that have had missteps for directors, specifically, because you can really kind of put yourself in the shoes of the directors that were in those rooms and, you know, it's like a boiled frog. Right? You keep turning up the heat a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more. And by the time it's at boiling, it's already too late. You don't know. You can't jump out of the pot. I think that happens to a lot of directors. It's helpful to see patterns.
- [28:59]
Megan Day
It is. And I just, I loved his framing around leadership. And so often this is just fundamentally a leadership problem. His idea of this mix of judgment and courage and a Little bit of humility mixed with arrogance gives you the ability to ask tough questions. And that really is what we have to demand of great directors.
- [29:26]
Dottie Schindlinger
It is, it is. I don't disagree with you, but again, I'm going to provide a little contrarian view because I think sometimes it's helpful to remember that they are also human beings. And boy, there's a lot of pressure to just not say something when nobody else is speaking up. And so you're right, it does take courage to be the one to get out there, to call out the bad stuff, to do the right thing. We all want to believe we're going to be that person. Right? We all want to believe we're going to be the person that runs into the burning building to save the child. But in the moment, it's really hard to run into that burning building. And it takes a real special mindset to be able to do that. And we want that out of our directors. But the truth is, there's a lot of directors, and first and foremost, they're all human beings and humans. We're not always good at that. We're not always good at running into that burning building. And so I think, yes, we need that courage. We need people to do that. I have a hard time not having empathy with our director crowd. It's a hard job. It's a thankless job. And sometimes that job requires you to do things that aren't. That are not at all in your own self interest. I think a lot about a friend of mine who was on a board of a company that I won't mention that spectacularly imploded. And she could see it coming and she knew she probably should have stepped off that board. But, you know, to her credit, she stuck it out and tried from the inside to clean it up. And because of that, she became a pariah. Like, it's really unfair. Like, she did the right thing. She actually stuck it out. She actually tried to clean it up. But because she didn't leave, she was blamed and she was not the one to blame. She was the one trying to save things. So it's a. It's a. I have empathy. I have a lot of empathy for. For people that do have courage. And I also have empathy for those who don't have enough courage and try their best and don't quite meet the mark. We're all human at the end of the day.
- [31:21]
Megan Day
Oh, you're getting soft in your old age, Dottie.
- [31:23]
Dottie Schindlinger
I am. I think I'm just getting old.
- [31:25]
Megan Day
Happy birthday, by the way.
- [31:26]
Dottie Schindlinger
Thanks. Thanks for that Megan. Well, on that note, that wraps up another episode of the Corporate Director Podcast, the Voice of Modern Governance. Like to say a few special thank yous. First and foremost to Alan Murray, maybe my favorite journalist, to have a chat with podcast producers Kira Ciccarelli, Steve Clayton and Laura Klein, our sponsors for the show, PwC, KPMG, Wilson Sonsini and Meridian Compensation Partners. And most especially, thank you to Diligent. If you like our show, please be sure to give us a rating on your podcast player of choice. You can also listen to our episodes and see more from the Diligent Institute by going to diligent.com resources thank you so much for listening.
- [32:08]
Podcast Narrator
You've been listening to the Corporate Director Podcast. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. If you'd like to learn more about corporate governance and tools to help directors do their job better, visit www.digent.com. thank you so much for listening. Until next time.