Achieving Investment Excellence

CHAPTER 13Learning to Decide and to Take Advice

Key Take Aways

This chapter covers what is required from a board to make decisions. Decision-making turns a group of individuals into a board. Decision-making combines all of the individual contributions into one, collective result. It provides unity of processes and deliberations. The board members might hold different beliefs or viewpoints, but the decision-making process leads to a unified choice that is communicated to the stakeholders.

Within this decision-making process, committee members make choices, future plans, and/or respond to environmental changes. They can demonstrate what they think and believe, and put in the open what they want or doubt. The result of the process provides direction and visibility as to what people can and want to do together, and what they collectively believe and create. They each deliver a contribution to a collective result, for which they receive money, appreciation and recognition. In order to create a collective result from all of the individual contributions, people must not only be able to provide their contribution, they must also be able to accept contributions from others. The collective contributions must somehow be compared with one another, weighed up, and assessed. In the end result, the individual contributions may not be visible but they must all have been considered seriously. ...