Make Boards Work - With Joanna Ling

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.This CEO calls his private equity board members James Bonds.He said it on my podcast with a straight face. They drive nice cars. They drink good wine. They are charming and very smart. And they have the license to kill, because the one job every board keeps for itself is hiring and firing the CEO.The license to kill was the first thing he could see when he walked into the room.His words: I was the servant of my board. I was not leveraging it.It took him years to flip that around. To look at the same smart, well-connected people and say, we share 98 percent of our interests, so work for me too.Ralph also shared the acquisition he lost because he had not prepared his board for it, and what that cost.

In March 2020, Astrid Schulte’s company went from 100 percent to zero in a week.Berendsohn is a 190-year-old family business. For most of those years the model was simple:500 salespeople driving across Europe, opening a suitcase of promotional goods in front of small business owners.Astrid had come in as a new investor and CEO in 2017 to rebuild that model for the internet era.By early 2020 she was halfway through the transformation, investing heavily, not yet profitable.Then lockdown. Nobody could drive anywhere. The salespeople were analog sellers with nowhere to sell. And the clients who were left had stopped thinking about gifts for their customers. They were thinking about surviving.Friends started calling her. Not to ask how she was doing. To ask, in all seriousness, when she was going to shut the company.Her board chair called too. He had been through crises in every company he had worked in, and he told her this one was real. Then he said: I am with you.The family shareholders went further. They told her management team that in 190 years there had been wars and depressions and moments where nobody believed the company would survive, and it always had. They expected this team to be strong enough as well.Astrid told me that was the moment she understood what a board is for. Every quarter it challenges you. In a crisis, it holds you up.I have written a lot about support and challenge as the two halves of board work. This is one of the clearest examples of the support half I have witnessed. Board Work at its finest.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.Miranda Naiman came on my podcast and shared how she built a board for her own company where she and her co-founders were deliberately outnumbered.Every entrepreneur asks her the same thing: why would you do that to yourself?Her answer: because we could only take the business so far on our own conviction. And conviction without challenge becomes blindness.Plus numerous other gems, for example about her bringing supreme value to a company by also thinking as a board director while being a client. Or about the risks of a chair being too close to the CEO.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.Anna Lecat sat down with me on the podcast and dismantled boardroom polite culture in one sentence:"Every conversation you do not have is a decision you haven't made."We spent decades watching directors lean on pre-board dinners to build trust. Good wine, easy small talk, zero friction.But pleasant dinners do nothing when hard trade-offs hit the agenda the next morning. Everyone smiles, nobody challenges the forecast, and polite silence gets mistaken for consensus.Boards often blame an aggressive CEO or a difficult founder for messy governance. In practice, the real breakdown sits with directors who hesitate to enforce boundaries the moment a conversation feels uncomfortable.The most effective board members do not dodge tension. They step right into it with one direct question:"What are we actively avoiding naming in this room?"Anna wrote the book on navigating high-stakes disagreement (Loving Conflict). In this episode, we unpacked how to stop postponing friction and turn candid pushback into actual governance leverage.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.Says Andrew: "When Tiger Global invested in 2011, I was convinced someone would walk in and take control. They didn't. For years, our 'board meetings' were an email update and a reply that said 'looks good, keep going.' I thought that was wonderful. It wasn't."We talked about all of this . The full arc. From having no real board, to the investor who changed everything by saying "if we're going to sell this company, it has to be bigger than Shane and Andrew." How that one sentence shifted how they operated. How Andrew kept slipping into "please mark my homework and give me an A" mode instead of using the board as a genuine resource. And how they eventually sold Yuppie Chef for a result none of them expected.If you're a founder figuring out what a board should actually be, or a board member wondering how to be genuinely useful, this one might resonate.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.Gordon's phone rang. It was the lead investor. First words: "Please don't quit."Gordon Rapkin sat down with Marc O.Stöckli on the Make Boards Work podcast and told that full story, including what happened next, which turned out to be the smartest thing anyone ever recommended to him. They separated the rearview mirror from the forward look. Changed who spoke when. Set ground rules that should have existed from day one.That company went on to sell for 2.5 to 3x the typical multiples in our space.We also talked about why Gordon believes every board needs an independent chair, why he treats the board as a competitive weapon and not a reporting obligation, and why the executive session, the part most CEOs resist, might be the most valuable fifteen minutes of the quarter.Worth a listen if you've ever walked out of a board meeting feeling worse than when you walked in.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.Alejandra has been an independent board director for almost two decades now. Across large banks, fintechs, family businesses in Mexico and Latin America. And if there's one thing she has learned, it's this: your conviction is your reputation.A chairman of a large family-owned company once invited her to lunch. He told her, "Whenever we need to build reserves, we'll do it. But not now." Alejandra told him her recommendation was to build reserves the way the authorities require. Otherwise she couldn't stay on the board.They built the reserves.Alejandra and I sat down on the MakeBoards podcast and we talked about moments like that. The courage it takes to speak up when you know it won't be popular. The times she has been invalidated, rejected, shut down in board meetings. And why she kept speaking up anyway.We also got into the difference between serving on large bank boards versus fintech boards. Why she finds fintechs more satisfying. How risk management isn't just a technical function but something that lives inside every board decision. And why a board that looks the same thinks the same, and a board that thinks the same misses everything.If you sit on boards, build companies, or work with independent directors, I think this one's worth your time.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.When Jan started Everphone ten years ago, he didn't think he'd still be the CEO. But here he is. Eight funding rounds. North of 100 million in revenues. And a board that's changed so completely from year one to year ten that it barely resembles the same institution.We sat down and we talked about that full arc. There was a specific meeting where Jan finally said, can we take fifteen minutes and talk about why none of us are enjoying this board thing? That conversation changed everything.We also got into something Jan thinks about a lot: boards can be too toxic or too nice, and both are equally dangerous. The sweet spot, clear, kind, direct, is harder than most people think.Worth a listen if you're a founder figuring out your board, or a board member wondering why the CEO seems guarded.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.Manuel has been running a PE-backed roll-up in education. Capital was the easy part.He scaled from around 50 people to nearly 250 in two years. The deals weren't the bottleneck. The money wasn't either. The people were.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level.We got into something Joanna does not usually talk about publicly. What it's actually like running a family business where the board is your cousins, your siblings, your parents, your uncles, and your in-laws.In a family board, the most important thing isn't the numbers.The most important thing is that everybody's happy. That's the good and the bad of it, all wrapped into one.We also talked about the other end of the spectrum - sitting on a venture-backed startup board where people shout at each other, the company almost runs out of money month to month, and everyone in the room has their own capital on the line.Two completely different worlds. Joanna has learned from both. And so can you:If you're in a family business, working with investors, or trying to figure out what a board should actually do for you, I think this one's worth a listen.