Readings

A supervisory board (the German Aufsichtsrat) has tasks and duties set by law. An advisory board (the German Beirat) has the role the company gives it.

That role varies a lot. A Beirat can be there purely to give advice, with no say over anything. Or it can be a body with real power, one that appoints and dismisses the managing directors, even against the wishes of individual family shareholders.

I have seen very different advisory boards. Some are there for show. In others the owners really want a sparring partner: someone who challenges them and is listened to, and who in some cases even has the power to overturn their decisions.

From the outside, it is difficult to tell them apart. They carry the same title.

So do not let the title put you off, and do not let it impress you either. An advisory board can be worth it, and I would not advise against one in principle. But do your homework.

Read its rules first. Then talk to the people on it, which matters more. If you can, meet each member on their own and ask each of them the same questions, the kind that show you what role the board actually plays. For example: How would you describe the culture here? When did you last have a real argument? What came out of the last controversial discussion?

Judge the board by those answers.

My first board seat came around the time Germany introduced its gender quota for supervisory boards. Whether it was just before or just after, boards knew it was coming and were preparing for it.

So it was clear why I was there. I felt the expectation that came with it: that I would push for more women in leadership. I wanted to anyway, less because of the law than because I believe diverse teams are better teams.

Whenever we looked at a shortlist for a senior role, I asked why there was no woman on it. I pushed the search firm on it too. In my experience, nobody meant any harm, it was just that nobody had thought of it. I kept asking, and that helped to correct it.

That was only the first step. Next came the questions about how we develop women managers and whether we had appropriate diversity policies. It was my topic. However, I did not want to be heard only on that one subject, or to become the spoilsport who always asks where the women are.

What helped me was humour. I would open with: “Yes, I know, here comes the women’s topic again. I still can’t spare you.” That made it easier to bring it up once more.

You were brought in because you are different. Keep raising your topic, and keep your sense of humour.

Take a scale-up where profitable growth is what counts. The plan says ten million in profitable revenue. The CEO delivers twenty.

I do not see why the variable pay should stop at ten.

Owners and management should want the same thing, and the pay should say so. In a scale-up the valuation rests mostly on profitability and on the growth still ahead. That is what the company should be optimising for. A cap breaks the alignment at the point where the owners gain the most.

Listed companies in Germany have to set a maximum by law, so for them the question is settled. In start-ups and scale-ups the board decides.

The logic runs both ways. Management brings a budget it considers realistic. Miss it, and the variable pay goes down. Beat it clearly, and it goes up, without a ceiling.

The obvious objection is that management will then budget low. That number does not come from nowhere. A scale-up usually has a long-term growth plan, and its investors came in on it. If it says 20 percent a year, 5 percent does not get through. Neither does 5 percent in a market growing at 10, because that means losing market share. So I check it against both.

Sometimes there's also luck involved, which I handle separately. A competitor goes bust for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and you take over its volumes. Demand spikes, as it did in the pandemic. A discretionary element lets the board adjust for that, down as well as up.

The numbers for a single year can also be dressed up. So I always build in a long-term component, and a year that only looks good does not pay off.

One condition goes with all of this. If the CEO earns well above plan, the people who built the result should share in it too, across the whole workforce.

When someone clearly beats their own plan through their own work, pay them for all of it.

Years ago, the head of a works council told me how our CEO treated his people. He shouted and yelled at them. Toward the board he showed a very different face.

A works council is the body German employees elect to represent them. What I heard from it would never have reached a board paper.

I took it to the board chair first, in confidence. Then we discussed it as a board.

We never relied on a single source. One account of a CEO can also come from someone settling a score. So we looked more closely. We talked to his direct reports and let them speak more in our meetings.

Outside Germany you may not have a works council in that form. You still want a view from further down, as unfiltered as you can get it.

It shows you more than how a CEO behaves. It also tells you how your own decisions arrive. We take them deliberately and responsibly, and a lot can still get lost on the way down. The people on the receiving end can tell you whether a well-meant measure actually landed.

Management presents one face of the company to the board. Find someone who shows you the other.

A board rarely gets into the detail of the business. It sees the company mainly through what management tells it. So almost everything depends on whether that team is credible.

AI has changed how I check this. I go through my own notes from past meetings, and with AI I can now do that much faster and see where what I was told no longer matches.

What struck me: the gut feeling I always had about whom I can believe lines up closely with that consistency over time.

In my experience, management teams rarely raise these gaps themselves. Many seem to rely on nobody noticing. With AI, somebody will.

So say it first. "Last time I told you X. That has not held, and this is why." When a management team opens with that, the board stops hunting for discrepancies, and the meeting has time for the fundamentals of the strategy.

The second thing a board can judge without the detail is how deep the thinking went. Show the options you discarded and why. Show the scenarios you ran. A board that sees the alternatives can judge a recommendation even where it cannot check every number.

Credibility is the most valuable thing a management team brings into the boardroom.

If you want your first board seat, a supervisory board course looks like the obvious first step. So I looked at what several well-known German-language programmes actually teach.

Law and numbers take up much of the time. In the programmes I could check module by module, rights, duties, liability, financial statements and the audit fill more than half the modules. Two of the certificates end in a multiple-choice exam.

You need to know all of that. In my experience, you can teach yourself much of it fairly easily.

The harder questions start once you sit in the room. How do you get a voice in a group where you cannot instruct anyone? How do you become part of a team that rarely meets?

These questions get little room. In the curricula I read, personal impact or communication shows up as one topic in a long list, or at most as one module out of six.

That has to do with who teaches. In my experience, these courses are taught mostly by subject experts and less often by practitioners. In one programme, the six trainers are lawyers, academics and an auditor.

So before you book, read the curriculum and look for the part that covers the room.

And then there is the bigger question: do you need the certificate at all? That is for one of my next postings.

This week I spoke with someone writing a paper on AI governance. We kept coming back to its two sides. One is the board's classic job: overseeing how the company uses AI. The other is how board members use AI themselves.

I believe if you do not use AI yourself, you cannot do the first job well.

The obvious objection is that I do not need to fly a plane to oversee an airline. True. An airline is a whole system, and I do not load the catering, run baggage claim or account for the bookings either. I can still judge all of it.

AI is different in reach. It changes every one of those functions at once, and with them the company's competitiveness. It sits at the centre of the race between the US and China. Serious people are debating whether it could endanger humanity and whether its development should be stopped. I cannot think of anything a board has had to oversee on that scale.

And you cannot learn it by reading. You grasp what it can do only by using it, day after day.

Using it has not made me an uncritical fan. It shows me the shortcomings, every time. I have been annoyed at more than one AI system while working out where each is good and where it still has its quirks.

The problems I hit at my desk are the company's problems on a smaller scale. When my data is well organised and the AI can get to it easily, the work goes fast. When I first have to pull it together from different sources, and have not even documented where it sits, it does not.

My main email runs on GMX, and the AI connectors for Gmail are much better than for anything else. That is an integration problem, the same one a company meets with its legacy systems.

Liability shows up as a question I ask about every single piece of information: can it go into an AI system at all? Data protection, confidentiality, whether it ends up in training. The question reaches past the model itself, to the speech recognition I dictate into and the transcription software. A company has to answer it across its whole workforce and all of its tools.

Once you have run into this at your own desk, you ask management different questions.

This is a strong position, and I would like to hear where you disagree. If you oversee AI without using it yourself, how do you form your judgment?

A board seat asks you to speak to so many topics. At dinner someone asks whether the AI bubble is about to burst, and nobody sent board papers for that.

So how I take in information matters more than it ever did.

I am a reader. I have always had to see something written for it to stick.

But now, a lot of information reaches me through my ears. Audio books while I walk, podcasts while I chop vegetables. I cannot read while I do either of those. Now I can do both at once. What is really hard is remembering the good stuff you hear.

On Friday I listened to Meckel & Matthes, the Handelsblatt podcast, on AI investment. They had figures on the gap between what these companies can plausibly earn and what is being spent on them right now, and a question I have been chewing on: are the big AI companies already too big to fail. I could not keep the numbers in my head. By the time I was back at my desk I had the argument and none of the evidence.

With something written I have this solved. I read it, I ask an AI for a short summary, and that goes into my Notion database. There I can search it and pull together everything I have on one subject. I tried the same with the podcast and could not easily get the transcript out of the app, apparently for data protection reasons.

One thing does work. I dictate. I send myself voice messages and record memos as soon as a thought shows up. That holds on to my own thinking. It does nothing for someone elses numbers.

How do you keep what you hear? I have no good method here, and I suspect some of you are further along than I am.

Repost. Erstveröffentlichung am 18.09.2026 versehentlich in der WomenPowerment-Gruppe

My first board seat was at a listed company in the MDAX. That put me on the lists of executive search firms almost automatically, and my second large mandate came through one of them.

Two things had changed: I was easier to find, and I knew more people.

The first is obvious: A listed company is public, and search consultants read the same public information everyone else reads. More mandates are filled through search firms, and that channel opens once your name appears somewhere it can be found.

I think nevertheless that the second matters more: Inside a company you know your company, and if you have been there long enough, your industry. On a supervisory board you sit with five to eight people from entirely different companies and sectors. Each of them knows a different set of people, and you are now in the room with all of them, several times a year. That is the multiplier.

Which raises the question of what to do when the only first seat on offer is a small one.

I would take the more interesting mandate over the bigger name. That is a personal preference and the trade-off is real, so decide for yourself. My reason is that what carries you long-term is the substance. A seat where you learn how board work actually functions and where you can move something is worth more than a seat with a well-known name where you sit quietly.

Part of the multiplier you can build by hand. If your first board does not come with a wide network attached, widen it yourself. Take part in the professional debates in your field where they are held in public, and say something under your own name. The people who fill seats read those too.

Take the interesting one.

You can be appointed to a board faster than you can leave one.

My own rule, from experience, is that you owe a board at least three years. Leave earlier and you have not seen a full cycle, and the exit says something about you that you will spend time explaining.

Which makes the first yes more expensive than it looks. I said yes far too often at the start.

The offer arrives and it is flattering. Someone has thought of you, someone wants you in the room, and the conversation is warm. That is a poor moment to work out whether the mandate fits, because you are working it out against an offer you already want to accept.

So do it before. Two questions are worth settling while nothing is on the table.

The first is time. The number in the letter is rarely the real one. Count the meetings, the preparation, the calls in between, and the year when something goes wrong. Then decide what you can carry alongside everything else you do.

The second is the state of the company. Structure and chaos are both work, and they are different work. A company with functioning governance asks you to think. A company without it asks you to build, often while it is running. Both are legitimate. Know which one you have the appetite for, and be honest about the answer.

This is the part that takes a year or two, and it is the reason to start before you need it. Criteria you set in the abstract hold when an offer is in front of you. Criteria you improvise on the phone do not.

Work out your no before the first yes.

Every search for a new non-executive director I have been part of started in the same place, with the question of what we were actually looking for. That question gets answered badly more often than it gets answered well.

The weak version writes down what the departing member could do and looks for that again. The strong version goes back to the board's competence matrix, asks what this board is missing, and argues it out. I have sat in both. The second conversation is the one that decides the appointment, and in my experience it often does not happen.

A word on the matrix, because I have criticised these before. As a selection criterion a competence matrix is a tick-box exercise. As a diagnosis of what a board does not have, it earns its place, and that is the use I mean here.

Then the names. Everyone in the room thinks about who they know, which happens in more or less every process I have been part of. A search firm is briefed as well, more often than it used to be. Even then, candidates whom someone on the board knows personally end up on the list.

What surprised me the first few times is that the profile changes while you are still searching. You talk to candidates who are very different from one another, and somewhere in those conversations you realise that what one of them brings matters more than what you wrote down at the start. So you rewrite the requirement halfway through, against something the board did not know it needed.

Which means candidates get turned down who fitted the brief as it was written.

If that call comes, the profile probably moved after you were on the list. Do not take the no personally.

Most of the board profiles I read are written by people who could do the job. The document does not show it.

Two things usually go wrong. The claims cannot be checked, and the profile tries to cover too much.

Take the claims first. “Strong network.” “Transformation experience.” “Digital competence.” They appear in almost every profile, and on their own they are too general to tell anyone anything. Back each one with something you actually did. When I go through a CV looking for where the transformation happened, I often cannot find it. The same goes for the size of what someone ran. A profile says she carried P&L responsibility and never says whether that was a ten million euro business or a billion euro one, whether she led forty people or four thousand. Say how big it was. Someone on the appointing side is trying to work out what you have actually handled, and without a number there is nothing to work out.

This is a question of evidence. Whether P&L responsibility belongs on anyone's board-readiness list is a separate argument. If you put it in your profile, make it checkable.

Then the reason all of this happens. Almost everyone writes to cover as much ground as possible. Strategy and transformation and digital and people, so that the profile fits whatever search happens to be running. I understand the instinct and it works against you. A profile built to match everything matches nothing in particular, and the reader moves on to the next one.

Breadth keeps you useful once you are in the room. In the document it does the opposite.

So narrow it. Name the few things you are demonstrably good at, the ones you can prove with a number and a situation, and let the rest go. You will fit fewer search profiles. That is the point.

Better on the shortlist for the right mandates than on the longlist for the wrong ones.

My first supervisory board seat took two weeks from the first conversation to the appointment.

That sounds like a success story. It was closer to an accident. I had met someone in a different context, and he then offered me a board mandate.

There was no search and no profile. There was also nothing in it that a candidate could have applied for.

My case was probably not unusual. Many seats are filled before anyone hears they are open, and they go to someone who is already known to a person in the room.

Which is what makes the first seat the hard one. Boards are risk averse. Once you hold one seat you get recommended on. Before that, you are a name that somebody has to vouch for.

Board experience works as a proxy here. A committee wants to know whether you can make the shift from direct responsibility to very indirect responsibility, and whether you can sit in a body you do not run. In that room you work through questions. You do not give instructions.

Show me that you have understood this and you score, even without a mandate to point to.

In a conversation I can usually hear within minutes which kind of candidate is in front of me, and the tell is motivation. Many say they want a board seat because the corporate career has gone quiet and a mandate carries standing. The ones who have worked it through tell me exactly why they want to be in a board and what they will contribute once they are there.

So get your why straight.

When I was first told that a German supervisory board wanted me as its chair, I was flattered. It is the most senior seat in the room and carries the most responsibility. That was pretty much the basis of my yes.

The first Hauptversammlung quickly stripped away any glamour. I sat at the front and read formalities into a microphone for what felt like an hour. Registered share capital. Shares present. Numbers like 3,467,382, digit by digit.

That is the visible part of the role. And the smaller part.

What really changes is everything between the meetings. The agenda is yours to drive. When does the board run its next effectiveness review? Does its composition still match what the company needs? If not, who has to go, and who tells them? Who drives the preparation of management board targets, bonus decisions and remuneration discussions?

A large listed company has a board office, in-house counsel and committees to carry much of that work. In a smaller AG, a surprising amount lands on the chair. There simply may be nobody else for it to land on.

The remuneration reflects some of that additional responsibility, but does it reflect the actual workload?

According to DSW, for financial year 2024 the chair of a DAX supervisory board received an average of €436,106, compared with €131,433 for an ordinary member. In the MDAX, it was €235,818 versus €71,978. In both cases, the chair received about 3.3 times as much.

And averages miss another part of the job. A chair’s year is far less predictable than a member’s. One crisis. One CEO resignation. One difficult succession. The workload can change overnight.

I would take a chair role again. But I would no longer walk into it on the flattery.

Before saying yes, I would settle four things: the realistic time commitment in a normal year, the availability expected when things go wrong, the remuneration against both, and the resources and committee structure available to do the job properly.

The chair is the most responsible seat in the room.

Price it that way before you take it.

I hear the same thing from board colleagues, in almost the same words: A new AI model is out. Then another one, rated higher than the last. They have stopped trying to keep up, and because they cannot keep up, they have stopped starting.

Everyone already knows the first piece of advice. Do not send every request to the strongest model. The reason usually given is cost, which turns model choice into a budget question and relies on one rule: the harder the task, the stronger the model.

That rule was mine too. Stay inside one provider, judge how complex a request is, send the complex ones up the ladder. In my case the provider is Anthropic and the top of the ladder is Claude Fable. It held until this week, when Fable stopped getting me anywhere on a larger piece of work. I ran the same task through Opus and through Sonnet. The results were better, and not by a small margin. Then I ran a second test on a different kind of task, building a complex spreadsheet. The ranking came out different again.

Better on a general benchmark does not mean better for what you actually do. Fit turns on the specific job, on the kind of work and the kind of output you need, and it moves from one job to the next in ways a score cannot predict.

So build your own benchmark. Take your most important tasks: the board paper analysis, the spreadsheet you rebuild, the strategy paper you draft. Run each of them through the models your setting gives you. Compare the output. That is the only ranking that applies to you.

For years I was the only woman on one of my boards. Then a second woman was appointed, and during the break of her first meeting I ran into her in the washroom.

I asked her what she made of the item we had just spent the last hour on. She asked me back. In those four minutes I understood the question better than I had after an hour at the table.

Nobody had been holding anything back in that room. A board discussion runs as a sequence of positions, each one stated and then left standing. A conversation between two people allows the question why, and the answer to that is where the reasoning sits.

We walked back in knowing where we agreed, where we did not, and what sat behind the difference.

Starting that conversation was easy for an obvious reason. She was the other woman in the room, and I did not have to think about how to open it.

What came out of it had nothing to do with that. I had her reasoning, and that works with any colleague.

So I started doing the same with the men on the board. Harder to begin, same result. The break is where you find out where the agreement and the disagreement on a subject actually run, and where a position is still moving.

Being the other woman in the room opened the door once. Everything useful that followed came from the subject we were both working on. That is what holds when a vote gets close.

The most useful fifteen minutes of a board meeting are the ones that are not on the agenda.

Germany's Corporate Governance Code is being revised. The draft came on 5 August, the consultation closes on 4 September, and the work is careful. Of 66 provisions, 13 fall away in whole or in part, five are merged, two are downgraded from recommendation to suggestion.

What the consultation is arguing about: age limits, meeting-format statistics, and whether tenure and diversity sit in the code text or in the qualification matrix.

Now search the code for artificial intelligence. It does not appear. Not in the current version, not in the draft, on none of the three levels the code operates on.

The commission does have a position. Its Praxis-Impuls on AI in the supervisory board, published in September 2025 and updated in March 2026, is a serious document: a basic understanding required of every member, responsibility staying with the director who uses it, the prospect that the business judgement rule will one day require a board to use what is available to it.

That document sits outside the code by design, and it sits outside the procedure with it. Code changes go to public consultation. Submissions are invited, and the commission publishes them afterwards. The Praxis-Impuls named no authors, invited no comment, and published no submissions.

Naming AI as a competence field in the code is not what I am asking for. The question is why the largest shift running through these companies never reached the one procedure where the public gets to argue.

The pattern repeats. Handelsblatt reported this month that not one DAX-40 remuneration system carries an explicit AI or digitalisation metric with its own weighting.

Something important arrives, and German governance starts looking for somewhere to file it. A cell in the matrix, a line in the pay system, a handout beside the code. The filing is settled before anyone asks what the board's job actually is when the business model it oversees is being rewritten by a technology most of its members cannot assess.

A code that demands an explanation for an age limit and demands nothing on artificial intelligence has its attention in the wrong place.

Nobody reads the minutes until they need them.

By then it is usually too late.

I have watched this pattern repeat itself in all jurisdictions that I have worked in. In boards where minutes were 5 pages or 25 pages long. A director raises a concern in the room. It gets a nod, maybe a short response, then the discussion moves on. Weeks later the minutes circulate. The concern has been summarised into nothing, or it is gone.

Silence at that point is not neutral. In every governance system I have worked in, a draft that goes unchallenged is the draft that gets approved. The vote confirming the minutes is a formality by the time it happens. Your name sits next to a record you never actually confirmed.

The minutes are the only formal record of what a board decided. Nothing else carries that weight afterward, memory least of all.

Two habits protect you.

When you raise a point that matters, ask directly for it to be recorded. Say it in the room, as a routine request, not a challenge to the chair. Company secretaries expect this from directors who take the oversight role seriously.

Read every set of minutes before you approve it. Board and committee both. Not a skim. If the record does not match what happened, request the correction in writing.

The mistake I see most often is not laziness. It is the assumption that someone else is checking accuracy on your behalf. Nobody is. That responsibility sits with each director individually, and it does not end when the mandate does.

What is written in the minutes protects you. What is missing from them does not.

Last week, shareholders at ATS reconfirmed me and my fellow directors for another year.

Every AGM re-election still gives me a small jolt of nerves, even after years of it. That jolt does real work. It puts me back, once a year, in front of the people who own the company, and reminds me concretely that the seat is theirs to renew, not mine to keep.

One-year term. Same as every year I have served on this board.

Colleagues on three-year cycles ask why I would choose the version that puts my seat back on the ballot every year. Not because it makes anyone work harder. It changes what a board can quietly avoid.

Once a year, the board has to have an explicit conversation. What does this composition need right now. Which skills that mattered three years ago have stopped mattering. Who no longer fits, and has anyone actually said so.

On a three-year cycle, that conversation is optional, and it usually gets postponed. Asking someone to leave after two years of a three-year term is a visible act. It reads oddly on a CV, and the person has planned around the full term. So boards wait. By year three, the fit question gets raised under pressure, with a director who already sensed it and a board that let it sit too long.

Annual re-election removes that cost. Not renewing a one-year term is the ordinary outcome, not a verdict on anyone.

The fear that annual cycles shorten a director's actual time on a board does not hold up. I joined this board in 2017. Nine annual re-elections later, I am still here. The rhythm of confirmation decided how often the fit question got asked. It never decided how long I stayed.

The short leash keeps the board honest about its own composition. On schedule, every year, whether anyone raised the fit question or not.

I feel real envy every August. LinkedIn fills up with posts from trips around the world and sailing crossings. Inboxes overflow with out-of-office replies: two weeks, four weeks, even six. Phones silent, colleagues fully switched off.

I have never managed this.

On a board, that option does not exist. Something can happen on any day of the year, and when it does, the responsibility does not sit with whoever happens to be reachable. It sits with the board, permanently and collectively.

A CEO can step away because there is an organisation underneath that keeps running without them for 48 hours, sometimes longer. A board has no such line to hand things to. Its function is judgment on demand, not operational leadership that someone else can cover.

The other difference is who carries the answer afterwards. A CEO's decisions trace back to one name. A board's decisions trace back to all of them, which means no single member can claim to have been off duty when it mattered.

So my out-of-office message would just say: still on. That is the actual price of the mandate: not the hours, not the travel, but always being findable when it counts.

Envy noted. Inbox open regardless.

Ask what makes someone board-ready, and you get the same list every time: P&L responsibility, a working knowledge of governance, formal training in directors' legal duties. All three matter. None of them is the real test.

The real test is volume. Sit on several boards and new subjects surface constantly, in parallel: a geopolitical shift disrupting one company, a new regulatory demand landing on another. Each one requires fluency at the highest level, immediately. No briefing pack arrives in time for the subject that just broke. Even a CEO, immersed in a single company, rarely faces that many live fronts at once. A director sitting across several boards does, as a matter of course.

That takes a permanent, proactive appetite for learning, on any subject, on no notice. Curiosity that runs constantly, well before and long after board prep week.

Even directors with deep expertise in one field need the breadth around it to hold up. A specialist who has stopped learning everywhere else becomes a liability the moment the agenda moves past their subject.

Formal qualifications get you into the room. Curiosity decides whether you are still useful once you are there.

Supervisory board work in Germany pays badly relative to the time a conscientious director puts into it. It carries personal liability. Its real contribution to a company's success is often hard to prove.

Ask people why they still want a seat, and the usual answers arrive fast: the profile, and the people you get to work with. Both are real. A board seat sits at the top of a company and touches every function inside it. That is where the visibility comes from. It also puts you in a room with directors and executives you would rarely meet from an operating role. The time commitment is more predictable than a full-time position, and a well-chosen mandate compensates properly.

None of that explains why I still do this after eleven years.

What holds me is the challenge of the role itself. A director has almost no direct power. You cannot instruct anyone. You cannot execute your own decisions. Every outcome you want has to travel through someone else's authority, built on judgment and trust, earned one question at a time. In that sense, running something yourself is the easier job.

And the range you need to cover to do this well keeps expanding. One mandate can move you from a financing question to a live cyber incident within the same quarter, and none of it is yours to decide alone. That range is what has kept me learning at a pace I never matched in an operating role.

Eleven years in, that challenge is still why I stay.

Fixed board retainers get negotiated like a day rate: anchor a number, negotiate around it. Equity is different. Options, shares, profit-sharing: the moment equity enters a board package, cash-negotiation logic stops applying.

Equity asks a different question: what the stake is actually worth. Start with your day rate. Multiply by the days the mandate actually costs: preparation, meetings, committee work, the calls that happen off the calendar. That is the capital you are putting in for a stake.

An investor who locks up capital for years, with no early exit and no certainty the bet plays out, expects a multiple on it. Three times. Five times, over a realistic horizon. Equity in a board package carries the same features: illiquid, locked in for the term, exposed to outcomes you do not control. Price it accordingly.

Before you say yes to equity, ask whether it is a return that justifies the capital you are committing.

Almost every cold application I have received arrived the same week a vacancy became public knowledge. Someone stepping down, someone not standing for re-election.

By then, the process had usually been running for months.

Composition ideally gets planned years ahead, the same way management succession does: which skills the board will need in two years, which profile is missing today and will be missing more urgently tomorrow.

Send an application letter into that process, and you are telling the room that you assumed the seat was still open the moment the vacancy became known.

It rarely is.

I have received a fair number of these letters over the years. Almost all of them came from people who had overestimated their readiness for the role. That is not a coincidence. Knowing how a board fills a seat and knowing what a board actually needs from a director draw on the same judgment.

If you want a seat, make sure you are the profile someone already has in mind before the vacancy exists. Slower work than a letter, less visible, but more effective.

You set the targets in January. Then the year happens.

A pandemic. A war on the continent. An energy shock. A tariff announcement that moves a whole sector before lunch. The target agreed in the first week of the year is now measuring a world that no longer exists.

This is not nostalgia for calmer times. The numbers carry it. Economic policy uncertainty reached its highest level this century in early 2025. The geopolitical risk index has run well above its average of the two decades before. Global supply chain pressure peaked at more than four standard deviations above its historical norm in the pandemic years. Equity volatility reached its third-highest closing peak since the index began in spring 2025, behind only 2008 and 2020. The shocks arrive more often, and they arrive from outside.

A fixed annual target handles none of this well. Met by a windfall, it overpays. Met by a shock, it punishes a management team for weather it did not make.

Boards already hold two partial answers. Wider target ranges. Relative metrics that measure a team against its peers, so a shock that hits everyone cancels out. Use both. They are sound, though relative metrics inherit a familiar question from my second post: someone still chooses the peers.

They still miss something. A relative metric rewards the team that fell less than the rest. It cannot separate a real achievement from a lucky escape. Only judgment can.

Some hear discretionary bonus and recoil, picturing a blank cheque. Three conditions take the cheque away. The judgment cuts both ways, down as well as up. Every use is explained in the remuneration report. And the maximum pay German law already requires puts a ceiling over the outcome. One more condition, so this does not become the fourteenth moving part: the qualitative element replaces metrics instead of joining them. Fewer formulas plus one accountable judgment.

This is the harder path. A formula is easy to hide behind. Judgment you defend in the open. That is also the answer to my second post: judgment failed there because it worked in the dark, inside the peer group. Here it works in daylight.

We spent two decades taking judgment out of pay to make it objective. A volatile world is asking for it back.

In all my years on boards, I have hardly ever met an executive who felt they were paid fairly. Not after a strong year. Not after a generous package. Not after the committee spent months getting the design right.

For a long time I read that as ingratitude. I have come to read it as information.

Pay satisfaction is relative. An executive does not weigh their number against their needs. They weigh it against the peer who got more, the rival who was promoted, the colleague who left for private equity. Behavioural economics has a plain name for this: reference dependence. We judge an outcome against a comparison point, and we feel a shortfall far more sharply than an equal gain.

This is why no package ever closes the gap. Raise the number and the comparison point rises with it. The gap reopens. A positional game has no finish line, and pay is a positional game.

Now set this next to the benchmark from my last post. The same force drives both. The executive compares upward and feels underpaid. The committee benchmarks upward and pays more. Two people, both looking sideways, both pushing the number one way.

Here is the uncomfortable part for boards. Precision in pay design carries a quiet promise: get the formula right and the executive will feel fairly treated. That promise cannot be kept. Precision can document a number. It cannot move the comparison point the number is judged against.

You will not make an executive feel fairly paid. Stop designing as if you can.

Here is a question every compensation committee should be able to answer. When did you last decide, on purpose, to pay an executive below the market average?

In my own experience, the honest answer is almost never. That single fact explains why executive pay only climbs.

The mechanism has a name: the Lake Wobegon effect, the town where every child is above average. A long-standing finding in US pay research: around ninety percent of large companies set their target at or above the median of their peer group. Not everyone can sit above the middle. So the middle rises. Every year.

The evidence is blunt. Executives paid below their peer median receive raises that run about 1.3 million dollars a year higher than those already above it. Roughly one in three below-median executives is pulled to or past the median each year. And the benchmark moves pay more powerfully than the share price does. Compensation tracks peers more closely than performance.

The percentages are American. The mechanism is not. In the DAX, the maximum pay supervisory boards write into their remuneration systems now averages above ten million euros for chief executives, and several companies raised their caps again in 2025.

Underneath sits a quiet trick. When companies choose their peer group, they lean toward larger firms and better-paid chief executives. The reference point is set high on purpose.

None of this needs a villain. Every committee acts reasonably, wanting to keep good people and pay them fairly against the market. The market is the sum of everyone doing exactly that at once. Reasonable steps, absurd aggregate.

So the fairness question and the restraint question collide. You cannot benchmark your way to below average. Someone has to be willing to sit there.

When did your board last choose to?

For two decades, boards have worked to make executive pay objective. Clear metrics. Defensible benchmarks. Independent committees. Every addition designed to take judgment, and its risk of bias, out of the room.

Look at where that effort landed. The DSW's 2025 study puts the average short-term bonus in a DAX company at eight performance metrics. The long-term plan adds five more. The reports describing all of this have grown so detailed that Germany's shareholder protection association finds them nearly impossible to compare from one company to the next.

The pursuit of objectivity produced two things, and both work against it.

First, systems too complex to steer. When pay depends on thirteen moving parts, no executive optimises for thirteen. The signal dissolves. Compensation stops directing behaviour and starts documenting it.

Second, pay that moves in one direction. Not always the payout itself: in the DAX, last year's payouts rose modestly. What climbs without pause are the reference points, the benchmarks and the caps that set the floor for every next negotiation.

Neither is an accident. Both follow from one root. You cannot engineer your way out of a human comparison problem with more measurement.

Over the coming weeks I want to take this apart: why pay only rises, why executives stay dissatisfied whatever you pay them, and why a target fixed in January rarely survives the year. Then what a board can actually do about it.

We set out to take judgment out of pay. We took the steering out instead.

SpaceX just went public with one man as CEO, CTO and Chair, holding 82 percent of the votes. Meta runs on Mark Zuckerberg's 61 percent. Oracle's founder chairs the board that is meant to supervise him.

The most valuable companies in America break the rules of good governance. And they keep winning.

So I put it to the test. I scored the 13 largest US value creators of the past three years on classic governance quality, independent chair, one share one vote, no controlling owner, and set that against the value they created.

The result: no relationship worth the name. Well-governed and badly-governed companies sit side by side, at the top and at the bottom. NVIDIA and Apple are cleanly governed and lead the field. Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, Walmart and Berkshire are founder- or family-controlled, and among the biggest value creators of recent years. Governance quality does not predict who creates value.

That kills the easy conclusion that governance is dead. It also kills the comfortable one that good governance drives returns. Governance does something else.

It is insurance against the day the founder is wrong. Zuckerberg has committed more than 80 billion dollars to Reality Labs against open investor objection, and no one could have stopped him. You cannot know in advance which bet is the ruinous one. The brake matters precisely because the outcome is unknown.

For a company with a controlling owner, the old checklist asks the wrong question. An independent board cannot check an owner who elects it. The useful questions are answerable: is there a real successor and a board that works without the founder, are related-party deals approved by the minority, do super-voting rights carry a sunset, is every dealing disclosed?

The title on the org chart tells you what the governance looks like. The voting structure tells you whether it works.

Full analysis, data and sources in the first comment.

You know you have become a thought partner the day the CEO calls you about something that is not on any agenda, before it is even a topic.

Most directors never get that call. On a German supervisory board the climb is steeper, because the structure casts you as the overseer by default. Assume a board where you want to be more than that. How do you get there?

Credibility comes first. You start with whatever authority your biography carries into the room: a strong track record, or deep expertise in a field that matters to this management team. Without it, the early months are an uphill climb. Younger directors feel this most. I still argue for appointing them, I once had a thirty-year-old on one of my boards, but the credibility a long career confers is the one thing they cannot yet have.

Then protect the executive's credibility. Once you have standing, the work turns on trust. Challenge the management hard, but never undermine them in front of their board. The common mistake is to perform your own expertise, to count your own interventions, and to miss what each one costs the CEO in the room.

Raise the hard points before the meeting, not inside it. Give them room to respond. Never ambush. That fairness, applied consistently, is what earns the trust.

The last level arrives when the executive trusts you beyond the boardroom and beyond your formal role. When the CEO calls on a question that has nothing to do with the supervisory board, long before it becomes a formal topic, you have arrived.

You become a thought partner in the conversations that no minutes record.

My first board mandate was with an MDAX-listed company. I assumed the DAX would come next.

It did not, and I let that ambition go. I went smaller instead. Today my mandates run from an early-stage startup to a very large corporation, and the size of the company tells me almost nothing about whether the seat is worth it.

Two things decide that for me. Impact, and the people I work with.

On impact: bigger often means less. As a single director on a large board, your individual voice carries less weight. In Germany the picture gets harder still. Codetermination and a listed supervisory board add political complexity that often drains energy. In a one-tier board, where the board carries real responsibility for strategy and not only oversight after the fact, a single director can move more.

The clearest case is my startup. I think of it as a speedboat. Highly agile, a wide open opportunity space, dozens of decisions still unmade. An established company is more like a tanker you can correct by a few degrees only, and slowly. The younger the company, the larger the space where one voice still changes the course.

The second criterion is the people. Your relationships with the other directors and the CEO matter. How the chair runs the room matters most. I would turn down a seat where I could have real impact if I did not believe I could work with the people in it.

Before you accept, meet every single board member and look hardest at the chair. The org chart will not tell you what the room feels like.

Size is the easiest thing to see and the least worth chasing.

For most of my early career, I refused to take the notes.

"Frau Lange, schreiben Sie mal mit." Write it down, would you. The request landed on me more often than on the men in the room, and I learned to decline it on purpose. Picking up the pen looked like being handed the secretary's job. So I kept my hands off it.

In the boardroom I had to unlearn that.

The person who structures the conversation runs it. Talking the most does not do that. Standing up, organizing the thinking, summarizing where the room has landed and naming what is still open: that moves the meeting forward, and it shapes where the meeting ends up.

Agenda-setting usually sits with the chair. But not necessarily. Any board member can pick up the structuring role in the moment, and most leave it lying on the table because it still carries the whiff of admin work.

The minutes work the same way. Forget the legal-protection angle, that is a separate post. Think about influence. The strategic point you want the board to own has to survive into the written record. If it is not in the document, it did not happen. Whoever shapes the wording shapes what the board is later bound by.

The role I spent years avoiding is one of the quietest forms of leadership in a boardroom. You do not need the chair's title to take it. You need to be willing to pick up the pen.

Most senior executives start their first board search with the document they already have. A strong executive CV.

That instinct is a common reason capable people are not taken seriously for a mandate.

An executive CV shows what you did. Results, numbers, projects you led, teams you ran. A board CV shows what a board gains by having you in the room. Your ability to oversee, challenge and give direction to a management team you do not run.

A good executive CV reads like the trailer to an action film. Fast, full of highlights. A board CV reads like a documentary. Considered, reflective, strategic.

The board member sits one step removed from execution. And the reader of your materials, a chair, a nomination committee, a headhunter, asks one question throughout: what does this person add to our governance that we do not already have?

Every line should help answer it.

Across the board materials I reviewed, the same weakness showed up again and again. The CV stayed in the sender's perspective (what I have done) instead of the addressee's (what a board gets).

That single reframing, from sender to addressee, is what turns an executive profile into a board profile.

Most new NEDs spend their first months focused on the meeting. The agenda, the papers, the room. That is the wrong focus.

80% of what actually shapes decisions takes place before the session. Between people, not in front of them.

Many boards, especially male-dominated ones, operate on a specific currency: airtime, positional confirmation, who backs whom. I watched that dynamic carefully before I said much. I never found a way to play it well. What worked was listening until I understood where the real positions were. Then speaking with structure. Thesis, counterpoint, synthesis, placed at the right moment.

But the real leverage is outside the room.

One-on-ones before a session are where you learn how colleagues actually read the situation. What they think needs to happen. Where they will hold firm and where they won't. That is where a shared agenda takes shape, and where you decide what to push together and what to hold back.

The sessions where the board meets without management are often the most revealing. The gap between what the board genuinely believes and what it says in front of the executive team is regularly larger than you'd expect. Knowing that gap is what allows you to act with a clear picture.

Trust comes first. Before your arguments carry weight, the executive team needs to know you are working constructively. That takes time. It doesn't happen in the meeting room.

Then the hardest part. You were brought in because you think differently. And there is often an unspoken expectation that you will adapt. Both matter. Bringing your perspective without becoming a constant source of friction is something you learn. Push the same point every time and you lose alliances. Adapt completely and you lose the only reason you were brought in.

Your influence as a NED is built outside the session. The room is just where you use it.

Every DAX-40 company now publishes a board skills matrix. Ticks and crosses. Financial expertise. Industry experience. International background. ESG. Digital. AI.

The instrument is well-intentioned. Used well, it forces a useful conversation: What does this board actually need? What is missing? Where do we have gaps?

But several years in, the evidence is not encouraging.

The first problem is architecture. Most matrices make no distinction between what every director must bring, what the board needs to cover collectively, and what belongs outside the boardroom entirely. Cybersecurity is a good example. Does the board need a cybersecurity expert? Or does it need directors who can ask the right questions of the CISO and recognise when the answers are insufficient? Those are not the same requirement. Conflating them produces boards that look well-equipped on paper and are not.

The second problem is the rating logic. 84% of DAX and MDAX companies still use a binary classification: either "no knowledge" or "good knowledge." That binary tells you almost nothing. A director who attended two AI briefings and a director who built and sold an AI company both tick the same box.

Only 46% of DAX and MDAX companies disclose that their assessments are based on self-evaluation by board members. The rest do not say. Which means the matrix is, in most cases, an unvalidated self-assessment presented as an objective picture of board competence.

A useful skills matrix would distinguish competence levels clearly, define what each level means, and link claims to evidence. A few companies are moving in that direction. Most are not.

The instrument is sound. The implementation has a long way to go.

Not all board compensation is negotiable. At listed companies, you enter a structured system with external benchmarks and no room to move. What follows is for everyone else.

The real problem in most board compensation discussions is not the negotiation itself. It happens earlier. It is the moment when a director, often without realising it, starts from the company's number rather than her own. The instinct to accommodate is strong, particularly among women. I recognise it in myself. The company is early-stage. The budget is tight. They really want me. And so the internal monologue begins: "I understand they cannot pay much right now."

That is the mistake. And it happens before anyone has said a number.

Here is the method that helped me.

Take your highest total compensation year as an executive. Include everything: base, variable, benefits, pension contributions. Convert it to a day rate. Then add 20 to 30 percent. You are not employed. You carry no job security, no employer contributions, no structured career path. That adjustment reflects reality, not ambition. The number you arrive at is your anchor. Not their opening offer.

One more option worth knowing: lower the entry barrier. In mandates where both sides are uncertain, suggest starting with a defined consulting engagement before committing to a formal board role. It gives both parties a chance to see the value of the contribution in practice, and creates a natural transition point to renegotiate on better terms once the value is visible.

The common thread in all of this: you cannot negotiate well from a number you have not calculated yourself. Know what your time is worth before the conversation starts. Everything else follows from that.

Most people accepting their first board mandate have never thought carefully about what their time on a board is actually worth. The system does not make it easy. The rules differ fundamentally depending on where you sit.

At listed companies, board compensation is public, benchmarked externally, and not negotiable. You enter a system. Size drives the level: revenue, market capitalisation, complexity. The bigger the company, the higher the retainer. One pattern that still surprises many first-time directors: international mandates, particularly in the UK, Canada, and the US, pay significantly more than comparable German mandates. The reason is structural. A board expected to contribute to strategy and value creation is compensated differently from one whose primary function is oversight. The legal architecture shapes the role. The role determines the pay.

Outside listed companies, in Beiräten, PE-owned businesses, family companies, and start-ups, the level and the structure are more open. Three models appear most frequently.

Fixed retainers are one common form: predictable, straightforward, easy to administer.

Variable compensation ties part of the pay to company performance, either short-term through bonuses or profit-sharing, or long-term through equity or options, most commonly in growth-stage companies.

Time-based models work from an agreed day rate settled against actual engagement. This model has a real advantage: it forces a conscious conversation about the value of your contribution relative to cost, and it creates a natural basis for renegotiation when the scope of your involvement expands.

Three things are worth getting right before you sign, regardless of the model.

The level is set by context, not negotiation, in the listed world. In everything else, it is not. Know which situation you are in.

The compensation model signals the expected role. Fixed pay fits a control function. Variable pay implies co-responsibility for outcomes. Before accepting a variable structure, be precise about what accountability you are actually taking on.

Track your hours from day one. Time commitments that look contained at the outset rarely stay that way. Get the expected time commitment into the contract. Not as a formality. As the basis for every conversation that comes after it.

Next week: how to negotiate the number itself.

Nobody tells you where to sit.

It sounds trivial. It isn't. Visibility in a board meeting is not equal. Where you sit determines whether the chair sees you when you want to speak, whether you are in the sightline of the people whose attention matters, and whether you are perceived as central or peripheral to the discussion. Most first-time directors sit wherever is convenient. That is the first mistake.

Nobody tells you about the pre-meeting, either. The real discussion often happens before the formal one. Positions are formed bilaterally, sometimes days in advance. By the time the agenda item comes up, the outcome is frequently already settled. Walking into a board meeting cold, without prior conversations, means arriving after the game has started.

Nobody tells you to fight for your line in the minutes. The protocol is the only document that legally exists after the meeting. What is not in the minutes did not happen. If you raised a concern, ask for it to be recorded. Explicitly. The instinct in the room is to keep things smooth. That instinct can cost you later.

Nobody tells you that every contribution in a board meeting carries two messages simultaneously. What you say. And who you are signalling alignment with. Women tend to speak when they have something substantive to add. That discipline is an asset. But in a room that meets only few times a year, relationships are not built through proximity. They are built through deliberate acts. Alliances formed in the meeting itself, through explicit support of a colleague's point, matter more here than in almost any other professional context.

Most directors prepare thoroughly for the content. Far fewer prepare for the room.

Five years on a German Supervisory Board. Then a Canadian board appointment.

I assumed the governance fundamentals would be the same. The legal frameworks, the committee structures, the fiduciary logic. Maybe ten percent left to learn.

I was wrong about the ten percent.

The biggest difference had nothing to do with procedure. The two boards held fundamentally different answers to one question: what is a board actually for?

That question sits at the centre of a debate we keep having badly. We argue about board compensation, fixed versus variable, as if that were the real issue. Compensation is a derivative of the role. And the role is not the same thing across governance systems.

Two-tier versus one-tier. Control board versus strategic board. And a less visible third category, defined not by law but by drift, where the role has moved but the structure has not caught up.

I worked through the full argument in a LinkedIn article, including what the legal architecture actually determines, a framework across three board models, and why the compensation debate keeps missing the point.

Link in comments.

The most important job of the board is not oversight. It‘s succession.

46% of all CEO departures in Germany in recent years were classified as disruptive. Unexpected. Unplanned. In nearly half of those cases, there was no direct successor ready.

That number tells a lot about how seriously boards take succession planning. Often, boards discuss a list of 20 names once a year at the end of a nomination committee meeting. That‘s not succession planning.

Real succession work starts years earlier. It means knowing the people in the second and third tier of management. Not from a CV, but from actual exposure. Every board meeting is an opportunity: Let potential candidates present. Let directors observe how they think, how they handle pressure, how they communicate. Build a real picture over time, not an emergency impression when the seat is already empty.

"I told you so."

The sentence you most have to bite back as a non-executive director.

I have raised an issue in January that got parked. Reraised it in March. Watched it get quietly absorbed by April. Then presented as a new idea in June.

By someone else.

The temptation is real. But claiming that moment is a mistake. Because the most durable decisions are the ones the executive team believes they arrived at themselves. That self-discovered logic is not a failure of credit. It is how organisations actually change.

The advisor who cannot resist saying "I told you so" is still thinking like an executive.

The job is to be the prompter. To place the right thought at the right moment, then let someone else take the bow.

Dienstag, 19. Mai 2026

How board members can use AI to become more effective!

Keine Kachel, Bild Kirsten

Most AI conversations at board level are about what companies should do about AI. Few talk about what board members themselves should do with it.

I've been using Claude intensely across my mandates. My learning curve was steep: What is actually safe for board-level work? How many hours of work does it save me? Which prompts work? What do I never put in?

I got asked a lot about my experiences, so I wrote it down.

My Board Member's AI Starter Kit covers:

How to set up Claude safely, including the two settings that matter most for confidentiality

Five specific use cases: from automated mandate briefings to financial statement analysis to consistency checking across board meetings

How to work with confidential board materials without compromising them

The prompts I actually use, copied into a prompt library at the end

It is not a technology tutorial. It is a practical account of what works, written from my board experience. And it actually did help me becoming more effective – more than I ever expected!

Download link in the comments.

Reporting documents what happened. Governance shapes what happens next.

The EU Omnibus I Directive, adopted in February 2026, narrows CSRD to companies with more than 1,000 employees and more than €450 million in annual turnover. An estimated 80% of previously in-scope companies fall out.

That correction was overdue. The original scope was disproportionate.

But the harder problem was not the reporting burden.

I chair a Sustainability Committee. The pattern I see: CSRD created urgency around sustainability. That urgency went almost entirely into compliance. Data collection, frameworks, auditor conversations. Very little into the question that actually matters: which sustainability factors will materially affect our competitive position in the next five to ten years?

Reporting documents what happened. Governance shapes what happens next.

No regulation fixes that distinction. The board has to.

Fewer companies in scope will not help if the wrong questions are on the agenda.

The board paper was 243 pages long.

The actual decision was on page 237.

I've seen this pattern more times than I can count. Management works for weeks on analysis, context, background. And buries the one thing the board needs to decide somewhere near the end.

The result: two hours of discussion about the wrong things. A decision made in the last 15 minutes, under time pressure, with half the board mentally already somewhere else.

Good board papers are not summaries of everything management knows. They are structured arguments for a specific decision. With the ask on page one.

If your board papers don't start with "We are asking the board to approve X, because Y, by Z date": that's worth fixing before the next meeting.

Samstag, 9. Mai 2026

Sonder-Post WomenPowerment: Nachbericht Live Meeting

Sonderpost außerhalb des Themenrasters

More than 100 senior women. Two days in Frankfurt. And a theme most professional networks would not really touch: Failing Forward.

I wasn’t sure how it would land. Failure, the moments where things simply don’t work out, is not exactly standard conference fare. There were doubts: Too personal? Too heavy? Does this belong in a professional network? The answer was a clear yes.

What happened over the last two days was not navel-gazing or collective commiseration. It was something rarer: an unflinching, honest, intellectually serious examination of failure, individual and organisational, personal and structural. The quality of the conversations, the trust in the room, the willingness to go to uncomfortable places without losing the forward perspective… it exceeded everything I had hoped for.

Looking back and looking forward:

Depth is only possible where there is trust. And trust, it turns out, is exactly what this network has built over four years, grounded in something BCG gave us long before WomenPowerment existed. Once BCG, always BCG. That shared foundation is not a cliché. It is the reason we could sit together and speak honestly about the things that usually stay invisible.

This meeting was not an endpoint. The Silent Network, a confidential, voluntary peer infrastructure we launched at the event, will carry what started in Frankfurt well beyond these two days. I believe it will change how we support each other in the years ahead.

Many people made this possible and deserve to be named:

Thank you to Boston Consulting Group (BCG) , Carla Spörle , Dr. Stephanie Wegener not only for enabling this network, but for the foundation that makes this sense of belonging real.

Thank you to the 20+ facilitators who prepared and led sessions with courage, honesty, and extraordinary care.

Thank you to Valerie Glasmacher, Veronika Bernhard , Maria Mutschler Madita Wichmann and everyone in the background for the flawless organisation, the kind that makes complexity invisible.

And thank you to Christina Foerster for opening our evening with exactly the right energy: inspiring, grounded, and genuinely herself.

On to the fifth edition!

Donnerstag, 7. Mai 2026

Sonder-Post WomenPowerment: Ankündigung Live Meeting

Sonderpost außerhalb des Themenrasters

Tomorrow, 100+ senior women are gathering in Frankfurt for the 4th BCG WomenPowerment Live Meeting.

Our theme: Failing Forward.

Not the sanitised version — not "I failed, I learned, I grew." The real thing: careers suddenly interrupted. Ventures that were going well until they weren't. Leadership in systems that were broken from the start. Moments where the professional and the personal collapse at the same time.

At this level, failure is rarely simple. And it's rarely talked about honestly. That's exactly what we aim for.

After four years of building this network — podcasts, virtual sessions, Slack communities — there is nothing quite like the energy of a room full of women. Where we bring our whole selves. Not just our CVs. Our real experiences, real setbacks, real questions.

I can't wait to see everyone in person.

For the past several years, I had the opportunity to discuss with high-caliber women what good governance really means — and how to be effective as a board member.

Most of these conversations happened in closed peer formats: the BCG WomenPowerment Board Circle, and similar groups that I led in other networks. Women who actually sit on boards, comparing notes on what really happens in boardrooms. What headhunters don't tell you. What the governance literature doesn't cover. What you only learn by being in the room — or by leading the room.

Running these groups, and serving on boards myself in Germany, the UK, and Canada, surfaced something interesting: the knowledge gap for people entering board careers isn't about competence. It's about access — to real information, real peer experience, and honest conversations about how boards actually work.

I've watched highly qualified women be passed over — not because they lacked the skills, but because they weren't visible in the right way at the right time. I've seen governance cultures that are worlds apart — depending on which country you're in. And I've had conversations in these peer groups that deserve a wider reach — because they'd help far more people than they currently do.

Starting now, I'm going to write about what I've seen and what I think.

About boards, governance, and what it actually takes to build a serious board career. No theory. No generic leadership advice. Just what I've learned — and where I have a clear view.