A couple of weeks ago the chief executive of a nonprofit serving adults and children with disabilities called me to discuss my facilitating a 1 ½-day strategic planning retreat for her board and executive team.  She asked what I thought about our devoting 3 or 4 hours of the retreat to developing her board’s governing capacity, in addition to our visioning and issue identification work. I agreed that a governing session made the best of sense, and we got to talking about governing issues in her agency.

She kicked off our discussion by saying, “At the top of my list is getting my board downsized.”  “Oh really,” I responded, “why is that?”  It turns out that she’d recently attended a conference workshop at which the presenter, a board consultant, had observed that the “ideal” size of a nonprofit board was 9 to 15 members tops, and anyone with boards much larger than 15 should seriously consider downsizing.  “Well, Doug,” she said, “by that standard, my 25-member board is an obvious candidate for downsizing.” 

To make a long story short, after I pointed out that I had worked with any number of boards with more than 25 members that functioned as really high-impact governing bodies, and that reducing her board’s size would come at a steep cost in terms of diminished diversity, brainpower, access to resources, and political clout, we agreed that she should avoid the slippery slope of downsizing.  We agreed that it would make better sense to concentrate on clarifying her current board’s role, updating its committee structure, and mapping out processes for more effective board involvement in such critical governing processes as strategic planning and performance monitoring.
 
Why tell you this story?  Because it’s another example of how much really bad advice – what I call “fallacious little golden rules” – is floating around in the governing arena.  My advice to my board development clients and other colleagues is “caveat emptor” – buyer beware!  Be a cautious consumer of governing counsel; always be on guard, never take such advice at face value, and always, always, always think more than twice before acting.  Take board downsizing, whose advocates more often than not, in my experience, base their fallacious small-is-better wisdom on a negative premise:  “Boards are dangerous, always capable of  ‘micro-managing,’ they think, “and so we’ve got to keep the board small enough to maintain control and contain the threat.”  They seldom put it quite this baldly, but, believe me, that’s where they’re coming from.  So “caveat emptor” should be your watchword in the governing business.

One reason I’m writing my newest book, Becoming Really Board-Savvy:  10 Tips for CEOs and Top Executives, is to provide you with sound, thoroughly tested advice in a high-stakes arena – and, of course, to help you become a more discerning consumer of governing wisdom.  The book will hit the streets in June and will be available on our  Books and CD ROMs page.

In January 2007, the Governance Task Force of the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, consisting of several Lighthouse Board members and the CEO, Virginia Jacko, recommended that the Board take a number of steps to clarify its governing role and strengthen its structure and processes.  The Board overwhelmingly approved the Task Force recommendations, including a new standing committee structure, and in the 13 or so months since then the recommendations have been fully implemented, with Virginia’s enthusiastic backing and strong support. I was privileged to work closely with Virginia and her Task Force colleagues in my capacity as “Governance Counsel” to the effort, and I have stayed in close touch with the Lighthouse since then.  This might sound like another consulting case study, but there’s a twist, as I’ll explain.  Let me back up a bit.

In late summer 2006 I found a message on my voice mail from a senior executive at the Lighthouse, saying that their CEO, Virginia, was interested in talking with me about strengthening the Lighthouse Board of Directors’ governing capacity.  I was pleased, but not terribly surprised, since a few months earlier I had spent an hour talking with a couple of senior executives from the Lighthouse after a workshop I had presented for the Broward County United Way, and I knew they were enthusiastic about putting the board development ideas I’d shared to work if they could swing it.  When Virginia and I connected by phone a day or two later, she explained that, as a new CEO, she was very interested in building a really strong partnership with her Board and that she was determined to have her Board play an active role in setting strategic directions, rather than just sitting back and reacting to finished staff work.  Convinced that Virginia and I could work productively together, I sent her a proposal that was accepted, and we arranged to meet at her office a week or so later.

Thus began my collaboration with one of the most visionary, insightful, and energetic CEOs I’ve been privileged to work with in many a year.  Oh, one other thing, Virginia is totally blind.  Experiencing gradual vision loss while she was serving as Director of Financial Affairs at Purdue University, where she spent 24 years, Virginia realized that her life, professional and personal, was at a dramatic turning point.  She could retreat from the wider world, falling victim to a health catastrophe, or she could take action to ensure an active professional life that capitalized on her substantial expertise and extensive experience.  Virginia tells me that she never for a moment considered retreating.  In 2001, she relocated to Miami to receive vocational rehabilitation training at the Miami Lighthouse.  Having successful completed her rehabilitation program, she became a public spokesperson for the Lighthouse, eventually joined its Board, and served as the Lighthouse’s interim President & CEO before her permanent appointment.  She’s done an outstanding job since taking the helm, securing the largest single-donor gift in Lighthouse history - $1.1 million – growing program participation, expanding the facility, and more.  In May 2007, Virginia was named Business Woman of the Year in the Nonprofit Leader Category by the South Florida Business Journal. 

What an extraordinary leader!  Meeting after meeting in Virginia’s office over the months we worked together, I found myself forgetting that she was blind, reminded every now and then when I noticed her guide dog Tracker lying beside her chair.  I’m sure her success in a challenging role has much to do with her keen intelligence and rich professional experience, but many people equally qualified would probably have thrown in the towel, content to retire from active professional engagement, and very few, I’d venture to say, would have tackled the CEOship of a major nonprofit agency under the circumstances.  What really made the difference, so far as I can tell, is Virginia’s fundamental optimism and tremendous self-confidence.  Can this be learned?  I’m not sure, and I’d be interested in the reader’s opinion. 

Checking my voice mail a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving 07, I was startled to hear a voice I immediately recognized, even though I had last heard it over 40 years ago:  “Mr. Eadie, I am your former TMS student, Tariku Belay.  I am living in Minneapolis and hope you will call me."  What a rush of emotion I felt.  Tariku Belay and two other students had lived with me and my Peace Corps housemates for three years in the mid-sixties in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  They were students at Tafari Makonnen School, where my housemates and I taught.  Tariku and I parted in 1967, when I returned to the States for graduate school and Tariku began his senior year at TMS.  His photo on my bookcase, along with a flask made from animal horn – his parting gift – helped keep him fresh in my memory.

Tariku and I corresponded now and then for two years or so after my returning to the States, and then fell out of touch.  Ethiopia, you might recall, descended into a dark period in the seventies.  Emperor Haile Selassie, “Lion of Judah, King of Kings,” was overthrown in a military coup and eventually executed, and the brutal Mengistu regime came to power not long afterward.  From news accounts and talking with the occasional Ethiopian I met in the States, I was aware that thousands of students died during this sad era in Ethiopian history.  Hearing nothing from Tariku as the years passed, I assumed that he had fallen victim to the regime.  Until November 2007, that is.

When I returned Tariku’s call that evening, I learned that he was teaching high school math in the Minneapolis Public Schools and planning to begin graduate work in spring 08.  He had, he said, searched for me in his early (pre-internet) days in the States, but eventually gave up.  I also learned that his being alive, much less doing professional work and living comfortably in the States, was nothing short of a miracle.  Imprisoned for over a year in Addis (“Life didn’t seem worth living,” he told me), Tariku managed to escape, went underground in Addis for several weeks, moving from home to home just ahead of the police, and then walked for several days and nights to Sudan, where he lived for four years before coming to the States as a political refugee. 

My wife Barbara and I are looking forward to Tariku’s visit this coming summer, when we plan to invite several friends to our home to meet Tariku and hear his dramatic story, and also to learn a bit about Ethiopia.  I’ll let you know how the reunion goes.

One more thing.  My former student became my teacher only a couple of days after our telephone reunion, when I flew to Chicago to facilitate an association board retreat.  The board meeting went quite well, but the trip was anything but pleasant.  Arriving at O’Hare two hours late, I was already tired and irritated when I checked into my hotel downtown, only to find that there wasn’t any telephone service in the room.  Unpacking in my new room an hour later, I found that the heat wasn’t working (in November!).  When the heating unit was finally repaired, and I sat down to a room service sandwich, it was midnight, and my meeting the next morning was to begin at 7 a.m.  Exhausted and frazzled, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself – until, that is, Tariku’s amazing odyssey came to mind.  “Give it a break,” I said to myself, “quit whining and just appreciate how privileged your life has been:  a lovely wife, a comfortable home on the water, work that you love – and all of this achieved without anything remotely close to the kind of suffering that Tariku went through.”  I fell asleep feeling truly blessed, thanks to Tariku’s incredible story.  It will be so good to see him again and let him know how the student has educated his teacher.