Diane Greene, board director at Google and Intuit and former CEO of VMware, discusses how board directors can effectively communicate audit committee findings without alienating executive leadership.
“In the audit committee, when you see something not going well, it isn't really a CEO thing. It's a company thing. So, so you're not, You know, when you're doing the readout, you're just saying, we see this problem at the company. You're not saying the CEO is messing up.”
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“I don't ever suggest something. That's like a golden rule.”
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Greene: Board members should never dictate strategy to company management
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Greene: Directors should master one business unit to calibrate overall management
“It's important for me to have depth in one part of the company, because the company has a uniform culture, and so I have a context for anything I'm hearing about, and in a few ways I can calibrate, because when they talk about the area where I have a lot of de…”
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Greene: Startup boards are either unnecessary or ignored during crises
“The reason I don't go on startups is my experience with being on startup boards is either they don't need me at all because everything goes so great. Or they really need me, and they don't want to listen to me.”
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Greene: Board members add value by asking questions from outside perspectives
“The board member frames things in their mind very differently from people inside the company, and so you can often ask a question that was just coming at such a different angle from people immersed in the day-to-day that it's really useful to them. So, and I t…”
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Greene: Prescriptive board members require strong management teams to filter bad advice
“You need a really strong management team if you're gonna do things like that. You have to be really careful if the management team isn't strong enough to handle, you know, because they have even more context.”
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