Boardroom Notes
Essays and frameworks on boards, governance, AI, healthcare and private capital.
Essays
Eric Ries's Incorruptible argues that good companies go bad because of how they are owned and governed, not because of who runs them. His diagnosis of short-termism is right. His cure is harder to apply.
Read essayDavid Epstein's Inside the Box argues that constraints, not freedom, produce our best work. For boards, it reframes budgets, deadlines and scope as design choices rather than mere controls.
Read essayJon McNeill, Tesla's former President, sets out the five-step method behind Tesla's hypergrowth. Its most valuable lesson for boards is also the simplest, delete before you automate.
Read essayArthur C. Brooks's The Meaning of Your Life is not a business book. But its argument about the two halves of the brain offers one of the clearest lenses I have found on what AI will, and will not, take from leaders.
Read essayI have been appointed Chair of the Board of Qinecsa Solutions, a global pharmacovigilance specialist combining scientific expertise with a technology-powered platform. Here is why this sector, and this company, matter.
Read essayRead together, Dan Wang's Breakneck and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance ask why rich societies have become so poor at turning ambition into physical reality — and what boards, investors and Europe should take from the answer.
Read essayA model performing well in a study is not the same as an organisation being ready to deploy it safely. Healthcare AI is an operating-model change — and that gap is the board's to govern.
Read essayThe Mansion House Accord is welcome, but a pension-allocation target is not a capital-markets strategy. The test is whether high-quality UK companies can actually access the capital to scale.
Read essayYoung people are often called impatient or unrealistic. The polling suggests something else — a rational reading of housing, work and security. For boards, that is a workforce-strategy question, not a social footnote.
Read essayPrivate-company governance sits closer to ownership, capital, founders and execution. The board has to be designed for that reality.
Read essayThe chair-CEO relationship works best when support, challenge, trust and escalation are made explicit.
Read essayBoards do not need to become machine-learning teams, but they do need sharper questions about data, accountability, controls and resilience.
Read essayMedTech boards govern across overlapping systems: clinical evidence, regulation, reimbursement, adoption, product risk and commercial scale.
Read essayCapital matters, but so do boards capable of helping companies scale through complexity, regulation and international expansion.
Read essayFrameworks
Compact, practical frameworks you can take straight into a board conversation.
Give directors a practical way to ask better questions about AI without pretending to be engineers.
Open frameworkMove from informal oversight to governance that is disciplined without becoming bureaucratic.
Open frameworkUse the board pack to test whether the board is being asked to think or merely to absorb information.
Open frameworkMake the working relationship between chair and CEO explicit before tension tests it.
Open frameworkEstablish trust, rhythm and clarity before trying to reshape the room.
Open frameworkConnect evidence, regulation, reimbursement, adoption and commercial scale in one board-level view.
Open frameworkKeep owners, founders and independent leadership aligned around value creation and control.
Open frameworkClarify the line between challenge, support and intervention before governance becomes either passive or intrusive.
Open frameworkDistribution list
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