New book aimed at board directors

Associate Fellow Kathryn Bishop has co-authored a new book with Gillian Camm, Board Talk: 18 crucial conversations that count inside and outside the boardroom (Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2023).

The book is an accessible guide to the business of being a board director, through the lens of 18 crucial conversations. It poses a range of questions for directors, including:

• How do you understand what is really going on in an organisation, so you can exercise the oversight that is required from you?
• How do you overcome the information asymmetry problem, where the executive directors know more about the operation than you do?
• How will you collaborate as a board to set the right strategic direction in a context that changes constantly?
• How will you see the organisation through the eyes of your advisors, your employees and your key stakeholders?
• How can you manage the risks you know about as well as the ones you don’t?

The authors make the case that best tool for all of this is conversation – about the right topics, with the right people, at the right time. This book shows what these conversations need to cover and how to make them count.

More information and buy the book

The book is written to be of use to those already on a board as well as to encourage those who are thinking about taking a board role. This includes individuals ranging from new directors of a PLC, to long-standing Trustees of a charity, or governors of an educational institution.

Kathryn Bishop and Gillian Camm both have decades of experience operating at board level in listed and private companies, charities, government boards, professional services firms and educational establishments. They have blended this with their experience of selecting, developing, and teaching non-executives, and underpinned it with a carefully curated selection of the most relevant and usable board research together with their own research insights.

Kathryn Bishop CBE is an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College and an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, where she directs the School’s development programmes for women leaders, both online and residential. She has a range of roles outside her teaching, and serves as a non-executive director on the board of an international law firm, DAC Beachcroft, and as chairman of a charitable foundation of schools and nurseries.

The book was listed as a number one bestseller in business skills on Amazon when it launched. At the recent Elumni Day at the Said Business School, both authors led a wide-ranging discussion about the key ideas in the book with over 50 elumni from a wide range of the business school’s executive programmes.