Where Board Readiness Becomes Board Service
The road from “I want to serve on a corporate board” to actually earning the seat often takes three to five years of deliberate work. Many capable candidates stall somewhere in the middle, not because they aren’t qualified, but because they may not have been shown the work that bridges readiness and service.
I help senior leaders and executives do that work.
I see it from four perspectives: as an executive, as a non-executive director, as a search practice leader, and as a researcher.
Four Perspectives, One Practice
I’ve spent my career accumulating four vantage points that bear directly on how board service actually works. I didn’t set out to build it this way, but together, they let me see a situation from more than one side.
As an executive. Twenty-five years in senior management and executive leadership. I know what it is to want a board seat and not yet see the path, because from inside corporate leadership, that path can be hard to make out. I’ve sat where many of the people I work with sit now.
As an independent director. Six boards across four sectors: private companies, a municipality, a university, and a nonprofit. I’ve seen the view from the other side of the table: what boards weigh, what they can overlook, and how the real decisions take shape well before the vote.
As a global executive search practice leader. Former Managing Partner and Practice Leader of CEO & Board Services for a global search firm, and today a Senior Advisor. I’ve seen how seats get filled in practice: who calls whom, what makes a candidate findable, and what can leave an equally qualified one overlooked.
As a researcher. A doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership, with dissertation and post-doctorate research on board composition and refreshment. I’ve studied the systemic patterns: what tends to work at scale, what tends to fail, and where the evidence points toward better practice.
For the executives we work with, that means guidance shaped by the many ways corporate board seats are filled, how boards decide, and what the evidence shows, so the path we build fits your situation specifically.
This makes me a unique find in this industry because I can approach a situation from multiple angles and perspectives.
In Collaboration With the Readiness Ecosystem
I don’t work apart from the board-readiness ecosystem. I work within it: as an advisor, coach, mentor, speaker, and ally.
Over the years I’ve built relationships across a wide range of the field’s organizations: the National Association of Corporate Directors, 50/50 Women on Boards, the Private Directors Association, Women Corporate Directors, OnBoard, the Executive Leadership Council, the Corporate Directors Forum, and Lean In. That same work extends to the Forum for Corporate Directors, Athena Alliance, Ascend Pinnacle, the Latino Corporate Directors Association, Invest Ahead, the Black Corporate Board Readiness program at Santa Clara University, and the Director Development Initiative at the UNC School of Law. Internationally, it reaches European Women on Boards.
These are programs whose work I believe in, and I actively send executives to them. When the fit between a person and a program matters more than anything else, I refer: before we work together, during, or after. These resources and more are gathered in the closing chapter of The Boardroom Journey, because knowing where to turn is part of the work itself.
I try to see the ecosystem as a whole rather than any single piece of it, across networks, geographies, and program types. That wider view is part of what I bring to the executives we serve: not just my own counsel, but a clear sense of where you fit and what might serve you best at each stage.
Where Programs End, Execution Work Begins
Board-readiness programs do something valuable, and they do it well. They build governance fluency. They sharpen your human capital and give you the language of the boardroom. They show that you’re a student of governance, someone who invests in continuous learning, and some offer a certification that adds a credential on top. If you’ve completed that work, you’ve done something real.
But the program ends, and then life happens.
Most executives leave a program with pages of notes and good intentions. Then the quarter closes, the team needs them, the travel picks back up, and the plan they meant to act on sits untouched. Often there wasn’t a concrete plan to begin with, just a sense of what they should be doing differently. And doing things differently is hard. It asks for new tradeoffs, sustained over months, with no one holding you to them.
That’s the gap. Not knowledge. Execution.
The work that bridges readiness and a seat has a shape. It starts with an honest inventory of what you bring. The Five Capitals framework I teach is one way to take stock of your personal capital, understand why you do what you do, and carry that into the boardroom. That inventory is where your value proposition comes into focus. I usually write about Optimal Diversity™ at the level of the board, the differing perspectives that make a boardroom whole. Here I mean it for you: the distinct perspective you bring that no one else at the table can, surfaced through reflection and named clearly enough that you connect the dots for others. It also means understanding how seats are actually won rather than how we wish they were, the territory my four strategies in Harvard Business Review map out. I expand on all three frameworks in The Boardroom Journey.
This is the work we do with the executives we serve, and it’s why accountability matters as much as insight. I see these patterns clearly because I’ve watched seats get filled from four sides: as an executive, a non-executive director, a search practice leader, and a researcher. The executives who earn them are rarely the ones who knew the most. They’re the ones who executed.
Programs get you ready. Execution is how you earn the seat.
What to Do Now
“If you’re interested, you will do what is convenient; if you’re committed, you’ll do whatever it takes.”
John Assaraf
If you recognize yourself in this, the next step is simple: do the work, and don’t do it alone.
The most direct way to start is to apply. The application is short and substantive. It asks about your experience, your board goals, and where you are in the journey, and it gives us what we need to arrive at our first conversation prepared. Think of it as the front door to working together.
If you would rather get the full picture before we talk, begin with the book. The Boardroom Journey lays out the frameworks, the strategies, and the resources in full. It is the same foundation the work is built on, and many of the executives we serve read the book before we started to work together.
As stated throughout The Boardroom Journey, there is never the perfect time to begin, so just begin. Although a board seat can occasionally come by chance, do you want to use hope as your strategy, or do you want to invest in yourself and execute a strategy to do the work and to be held to it?