The Best Approach To A Pre-Meeting Package of Information for the Board of Directors

I’m a huge believer in distributing the board material a few days in advance, having all the board members comment on it in advance of the meeting, and then having the meeting without going through the board material page by page. No death by endless Powerpoint, no reading a document I’ve already read. My favorite board meetings are the "one slide board meeting" where the only piece of paper allowed in the room is the agenda of the meeting.

When entrepreneurs don’t get this, I suggest that they pretend their board members can read and cognitively process the information in advance. And, if they don’t believe their board members will do this, just start having the board meeting under this assumption and watch how they board members get their shit together and read the material in advance.

In this recent magical moment, rather than receiving anything via email, a Google Doc notification showed up in my inbox. I went to it and the entire board package was in a single Google doc file. The entire management team and the entire board was included on it. As I read through the Google doc, whenever I had a comment or a question, I highlighted the section in question, hit Command-Option-M, and left a comment. Then, as other people read through the package, they left comments. And then the management team responded to the comments.

Brad Feld

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