Blind spots, biases and other pathologies in the boardroom

Corporate governance is one of the hottest topics in the business world now, as it always is in times of stress. Some of the recently discovered scandals and corporate failures can be traced back to corporate governance failures. Boards of directors must share some of the blame in many of the failures. Something was not working right, even in some boardrooms full of highly qualified individuals. Boards have been criticized for being too large or too small, for having members who are not independent or who lack the requisite knowledge, or for enabling "bad apple" directors who are inattentive, weak, and even self-serving, among other things. But that is not at all what this book is about. In this book we show how seemingly ideal boards, those with "best practice" size, composition, and structure, can still fail to provide good governance simply because they fall victim to problems inherent in all groups.