Camilla Cavendish talked about the expansion of company board packs as symbolic of our information overload culture (“Modern life is drowning in a sea of verbiage”, Opinion, FT.com, December 28).
I’m glad they’ve been called out as repeat offenders. The main problem with board packs, however, isn’t just that they’re too long (as frustrating as that is for directors). It’s that, as briefing documents go, they’re often not worth the paper they’re written on — badly structured, focused on the wrong things and lacking in insight.
You can’t govern what you can’t see, and bad board packs create information gaps that expose to risk the directors, and the organisations they serve.
The key to managing this risk, and enabling boards to deliver more value, lies in equipping management to write better board papers — not in improving directors’ speed-reading skills.
Megan Pantelides
Senior Director, Board Intelligence, London EC3, UK
