by Touch Stone Publishers | Jul 9, 2026
Sarah Watkins had been on the board of Crestfield Financial for eleven years. She had survived three CEOs, two proxy battles, a fintech acquisition that nearly cratered the stock, and one activist campaign that taught her more about her own governance blind spots than...
by Touch Stone Publishers | Jul 2, 2026
In the second quarter of 2024, a CEO we will call Marcus sat in a board meeting where the capital committee approved $4.7 million in AI infrastructure investment. The approval took eleven minutes. The subsequent discussion about what the company would do with that...
by Touch Stone Publishers | Jun 25, 2026
I have been in enough boardrooms to know the difference between the board that talks about trust and the board that builds it. The ones that talk about it usually have a policy. Maybe a code of ethics framed near the front door. A sustainability report with careful...
by Touch Stone Publishers | Jun 20, 2026
There is a category of leader who becomes genuinely interesting to me: the one who builds it before it is required. Not because regulations are coming. Not because the enforcement wave is visible on the horizon. Not because a board member asked about it at the last...
by Touch Stone Publishers | Jun 18, 2026
A board chair I have known for years called me the week the Colorado legislature voted to repeal the law everyone had been preparing for. He was relieved, and he wanted me to share the relief. The deadline that had been sitting on his calendar since last winter, the...
by Touch Stone Publishers | Jun 17, 2026
Separating the chairman and chief executive roles does not make a board better at its job. It makes a board feel better about its job. After three decades of governance codes treating an independent chair as the high-water mark of board reform, the evidence for the...
