Recently Brad Feld, Managing Director at Foundry Group posted a great blog post on his well followed blog titled “Great Board Meetings”. He very graciously explained how he has had a recent string of great board meetings and shared some of the attributes that he recognized in those meetings.

 An article written by Samuel Weigley titled “News Corp Shareholders Urged to Dump Murdoch, Other Directors” was published yesterday by the International Business Times (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/228440/20111010/news-corp-rupert-murdoch-james-murdoch-board-of-directors-phone-hacking-news-of-the-world.htm).

In a recent article titled “Advisory Boards Are on the Rise” By Kristin Gribben for Agenda Magazine, Advisory Board Architect’s (ABA) Founder Bob Arciniaga spoke about the influence and impact of using non-fiduciary advisory boards in public companies.

In a recent issue of boards and directors magazine there was a large section and many articles dedicated to the question of whether directors were underpaid. Many of the contributors were compensation consultants and current directors with public companies and the general consensus was that directors are underpaid. Not surprising i guess given the perspectives that the contributors represented. They did give some solid reasons as to why they saw it this way which I actually agree with.

ABA Founder Bob Arciniaga was recently interviewed about his thoughts and experiences with Customer Advisory Boards (Click to listen). The interview was conducted by Lisa Nirell of Energize Growth (www.energizegrowth.com) who is an award winning columnist and author of the book "EnergizeGrowth NOW: The Marketing Guide to a Wealthy Company." (Wiley, 2009).

I spoke at an event recently and was asked a question that I get asked more than you might expect. When I explained the benefits of having a more formalized advisory board process and structure an individual challenged me and said that he has an advisory board made up of some of his friends. He said that he choose a group of his friends  that know a lot more about business than him.

There was an interesting development that happened a few weeks ago which surprisingly really didn’t get much attention. A high profile CEO had a disagreement with the Chairman of the Board of the same company and this power struggle ended up in the resignation of the Chairman of the Board due to a “him or me” ultimatum by the CEO.

Advisory Board Architects (ABA) Founder Bob Arciniaga will be speaking on a panel with Former Colorado Governor Bill Owens on making boards more strategic on April 20, 2010. Governor Owens now sits on three public boards including Key Energy and Cloud Peak Energy two NYSE companies. The event will be held in the Denver Tech Center and will also feature Jay Coughlon, Managing Director of KRG Capital and Tim Keating, CEO of Keating Investments. The event is sponsored by HRO, Lockton, Technical Works Inc.