Eleven Countries, One Lesson

Whenever I describe my work — eleven countries, hundreds of boards, thousands of organisations influenced — people ask me which culture has it right. Is it the United Kingdom, with its long history of governance codes? The United States, with its activist-investor pressure? The Gulf, with its rapid institutional build-out? The Caribbean, where I learned a lot about doing more with less?

It is a fair question, but it is the wrong one. After two decades, I no longer believe there is a national model of board excellence. There are good and bad boards in every market I have worked in, and the differences within a country are usually larger than the differences between countries.

The one thing high-performing boards share

What the high-performing boards do have in common — across every market — is the willingness to have an honest internal conversation about their own effectiveness. Boards that have that conversation routinely, and act on it, get better. Boards that do not, do not. The country they are based in barely matters.

I will give you three concrete examples, deliberately drawn from different settings, to make the point.

The same lesson generalises beyond board work

This cross-jurisdictional perspective is useful in any setting where the regulatory framework varies by geography and the consumer-facing experience varies even more. Anyone evaluating the offshore non GamStop gambling sites that now reach UK players runs into exactly the same problem: most are licensed in Curaçao or Anjouan, but the variance within each licence is wider than the variance between licences, just as it is with boards across the eleven countries I have worked in. The instinct to ask 'which regulator is best' is the same instinct that asks 'which country has the best boards', and it leads you wrong in the same way. Look at each entity on its own terms.

A listed company in London

In London, I worked with a listed company whose board had a longstanding reputation for being well-run. The non-executive directors had read the books, attended the courses, and complied scrupulously with the UK Corporate Governance Code. They were also, quietly, talking past each other. The chair had a particular conversational style; the CFO had developed habits of preparation that suited that style; the audit committee chair had stopped probing certain areas because the chair did not invite the probe. The compliance was real; the effectiveness was not. The board's first honest conversation about its own dynamic took a year to set up and forty minutes to deliver. It changed everything.

A family business in Dubai

In Dubai, I worked with a family-business board that had only been formally constituted for two years. Half the directors were family; half were independent. The independents had been recruited specifically for their international experience. They sat through six months of board meetings without saying very much, because the cultural expectation in the room was that family members spoke first and at length. The lesson the board needed was not about governance frameworks. It was about whether the independents had actually been given a voice or just a seat. The conversation that unlocked the board was structural — meeting format, agenda design, time allocation — but it began with someone willing to ask whether the board was working at all.

A public-sector board in Trinidad

In Trinidad, I worked with a public-sector board whose annual review had become a paper exercise. Every director rated every other director as 'effective', filed the form, and moved on. We changed the format to a facilitated peer conversation, anonymous in writing but named in the room. The first session was painful. The second was useful. By the third, the board was discussing things it had been avoiding for years — succession, the chief executive's tenure, a particular committee that had drifted.

Three boards, three countries, three industries. The variable was not the regulatory framework. The variable was the willingness to look at themselves clearly.

Why codes alone cannot manufacture this

There is an important corollary to this. The best governance codes in the world cannot manufacture that willingness. A board that does not want to examine itself will find ways around any code. A board that does want to examine itself can do useful work even where the formal framework is light. This is why I have always preferred 'apply and explain' over 'comply or explain' — the first asks the board to think; the second lets the board tick boxes.

Schedule the conversation

If your board has not had a genuine effectiveness conversation in the last twelve months, the country you are sitting in is not your problem. The conversation is your problem. Schedule it.

I have never sat on a board that regretted having that conversation. I have sat on several that regretted having avoided it.