Acc Corboardroom

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology Robert J. Thomas, Michael Schrage, Joshua B. Bellin and George Marcotte

Research Report June 2008

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

Managers and directors alike face tough choices as they decide on the quality and quantity of information the board receives and uses in its governance and fiduciary roles. As the fallout from recent crises such as the sub-prime mortgage debacle illustrates, both sides must address the problem of “information asymmetry” – the gap between the information available to management and to the board. Our research suggests that tomorrow’s boardroom will be reshaped by three related forces: a thorough rethinking of directors’ information needs brought on by concerned stakeholders; dramatic improvements in the performance management approaches used to guide boards’ decision making; and the adoption of technologies that support critical board functions. Introduction Following recent high-profile reversals in the financial-services industry, pressure on boards from shareholder activists and regulators to prevent such meltdowns has intensified. But boards aren’t likely to take more initiative for assessing their companies’ performance unless they have access to relevant information when they need it. We believe that information will increasingly be viewed as critical to both superior governance and effective performance management at the board level. For directors especially, focusing on information processes in the boardroom will allow them to demonstrate that they are fulfilling their obligations as fiduciaries in making informed business judgments.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the quality and timeliness of information-sharing between managements and boards. Given that director independence has been a highly public issue since the demise of Enron, we believe that it will soon be considered troubling that independent directors— those particularly entrusted with responsibility to protect shareholder interests—are often dependent on management for the very thing they are expected to examine, assess and oversee: information about management’s performance and the company’s risks. We refer to this state of affairs as “information asymmetry.” Despite the growing availability of information about publicly traded companies—for example, via electronic filings and financial analyses on the Internet—directors all too often rely solely on information that comes from management when they make boardroom decisions.

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As one recent study on corporate governance emphasizes, “the board’s ability to provide meaningful oversight and useful advice is determined by the quality, timeliness and credibility of the information it has. And it’s clear to us that most boards have a long way to go in this area.”1 A major fiduciary responsibility of boards is to protect shareholder interests, and investors might reasonably ask how independent directors can faithfully fulfill their fiduciary duties if their information is not independent, as well. (See “Agency theory and information asymmetry.”)

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

Agency theory and information asymmetry The notion that corporate boards should be independent from management derives largely from agency theory.2 According to agency theory, management acts as an agent of the company’s owners or shareholders; however, an inherently self-interested management team can—if left unchecked—pursue priorities that may be at odds with owners’ best interests. To counter this dilemma, boards of directors are established to monitor management’s performance and to use levers such as compensation to align management’s behaviors with owners’ interests. To safeguard shareholders’ interests, boards should not be closely associated with management. In addition to justifying the independence of directors themselves, agency theory addresses the role of information. The theory suggests that management at all times knows more about the business than the company’s shareholders do, and this information asymmetry is one of the key factors that allows management to pursue goals that are divergent from shareholders’ interests in the first place. It follows, therefore, that to be truly effective in protecting shareholders’ interests, a board of directors needs to overcome this information asymmetry – in other words, it must have a firm grasp of the business and the risks it faces.

In figure 1, we suggest that each side has knowledge of itself and situations it faces and knowledge about the other side (and the situation it faces). Equally, each side has blind spots: things it doesn’t know about itself and things it doesn’t know about the other. The nature and quality of interaction between parties is always affected by how much they know about each other – about each other’s interests and objectives, fears and aspirations. As the figure reveals, four types of interactions can be identified:

Disputes are possible between management and the board when the line between management’s knowledge (for example, of operations) is challenged by the board’s quest for further discussion or review. The danger zone is the space where neither management nor the board have knowledge about a situation (for example, competitor behavior, legal or ethical terrain).

Open discussion or review is possible when each side reveals what it knows to the other. Boards fulfill their role as advisor when members share insights and experiences with management.

Figure 1 When the board is left uninformed about critical management issues, the resulting information asymmetry can lead to disputes and also to the creation of “danger zones” in which the board and management are equally unaware of looming problems.

Known to Management

Unknown to Management

Known to board

Open discussion / review

Board as advisor

Unknown to board

Disputed territory

Danger zone

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Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

In this research report, which draws on interviews with directors, shareholders, regulators and other key stakeholders, we offer three broad conclusions: 1. The pressure on both management and boards to address information asymmetry is likely to increase. 2. High-quality information is as vital to effective governance as it is to superior enterprise performance. 3. Technological solutions will dramatically improve the ability of boards to identify, acquire, analyze and act on the most relevant information.

The pressure builds Companies should be increasingly concerned about their board’s information process for three major reasons. First, because recent crises have starkly illustrated why boards should want critical performance and risk information; second, because the standards governing boardroom information are liable to change; and third, because information asymmetry within companies may prove more difficult to alter than forward-thinking managers and directors might anticipate. Addressing non-routine circumstances In November 2007, a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a former bank executive explicitly assigned to banking boards of directors a significant share of blame for the recent crisis in the industry.

“The handwriting has been on the wall for some time...and bank boards have made little effort to read it.”3 The mortgage crisis highlighted complex questions for corporate governance: What is the minimum amount and kind of information directors need to make prudent business judgments and effective decisions? The question of how much and what kinds of information should make their way into the boardroom may be most salient when unexpected events arise. When a surprising or unexpected decline in financial performance is reported, for example, or a potentially material ethical lapse is revealed, directors may not be able to rely solely on information from management. They may feel compelled by duty and law to seek sources of information that are free from management’s interpretations, analyses and biases – especially if they would later want to demonstrate that they had acted in an informed and independent manner. Making sure that boards have such information may mitigate crises once they begin, but addressing the board’s information needs may also help to prevent crises from occurring. For example, might bank boards have intervened earlier if they had an accurate picture of their banks’ risk exposures? Rather than treating the board primarily as a monitor that should be exposed to only the most relevant and “processed” information, management may instead want to see the board as a necessary counterweight to otherwise unchecked risks. Surveys consistently show, in fact, that directors are keen to serve this role and to engage management in discussions of strategic risk.4

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Preparing for new standards Managers and directors should also be aware that the regulatory and legal regime governing information in the boardroom is changing. The current laws in the United States describing the role that information should play in the boardroom to assure good governance are particularly liable to evolve because they are confused, conflicted and unclear. At the heart of the issue is the business judgment rule, a legal concept that protects directors in case they make bad business decisions. The rule states that a court of law will not decide on the wisdom of a board’s business decision so long as “the directors of a corporation acted on an informed basis, in good faith and in the honest belief that the action taken was in the best interests of the company.”5 Yale’s Ira Millstein, a leading governance scholar and lawyer, observes that the business judgment rule provides little guidance to board members: “Directors are supposed to act on an ‘informed basis’ – but after that, you’re in never-never land.” Legal linkages between the quality of information and the quality of business judgment are poorly defined, if defined at all. We believe that both managers and directors should be prepared for the emergence of stricter standards for boardroom information practices. Several plausible scenarios can be described. In addition to potential changes introduced by Congress and

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

the courts, these scenarios illustrate changes that may result from the efforts of activist investors, private equity firms, regulators and management itself: Activist investors clamor to know. Activist and institutional investors, frustrated by unpleasant surprises, restatements or disclosures that are inadequate to their perceived needs, demand greater transparency from the board. Either through collaboration during investor forums where the board meets with key shareholders, or perhaps as a result of a successful proxy battle, boards may agree to work with both management and investors to come up with “investor important” performance indicators for public disclosure. In essence, boards will be forced to reveal what information they deem important enough to justify their decisions. Sophisticated shareholders insist on sophisticated boardroom information. Hedge funds and institutional investors have already demonstrated that they can garner a very thorough understanding of a company’s performance and risks—perhaps more than the typical board itself can—by using publicly available data and highly advanced analytics. The vice chairman of a large financial services company explained in a recent interview that these developments will make it harder for board members to use lack of knowledge as an excuse for inaction: “You would expect the board member to have known [as much as the investors] because [the information] is available to people who are willing to dig.” In this scenario, board members accept that they need better information and more sophisticated analytics in order to demonstrate that they are acting on an informed basis.

Private equity firms claim they know “best practice.” Private equity partners, in an effort to assert their claim to an investor premium, argue that their companies enjoy success not only because of improved strategic positioning and increased operational efficiencies but also because of superior governance. Private equity ownership, they argue, improves governance, whereas in public companies, weak governance and oversight undermine the value of the firm. According to this scenario, private equity’s success creates a competitive benchmarking opportunity for publicly traded companies, which import private-equity governance best practices. Regulatory change broadens the board’s information role. Regulators turn SEC Chairman Christopher Cox’s vision of real-time reporting and real-time analysis of business results into reality. New digital disclosures allow technology-savvy analysts to decide which performance metrics are the most important to follow for any given company.6 The board’s time in this scenario would increasingly be invested in assessing to what extent these “investor important“ performance indicators should be used to guide or inform management action. In this environment, the board could become a more dominant institution—publicly defining which metrics will be used to steer the enterprise—or a more populist endeavor in which independent directors interpret their fiduciary obligation to mean that they must select the best of the analysts’ metrics to oversee the firm. Management takes the lead. Much the same way that Jack Welch asserted that GE must be number one or two in an industry or exit it, a Fortune 25 global firm could publicly declare that its board must be as remarkable as its

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management. In other words, superior governance would be deemed as essential to sustainable success as superior operations. In this scenario, the board would devise performance parameters to measure its own effectiveness, which it would then synthesize and present for investors. This disclosure would soon be accepted as a standard practice, and boardroom process would become increasingly transparent. Confronting the status quo In spite of looming changes that may foster stricter standards, most companies have been slow to adapt, for several reasons. (See “Information asymmetry: what the surveys say.”)

Information asymmetry: what the surveys say Recent surveys of corporate boards reveal that directors are often largely dependent on management for the information they receive: More than two-thirds of directors in one study lacked access to independent information channels.7 In another study, independent directors were found to be less satisfied with the financial, operational and strategic information they receive than their non-independent counterparts.8 Only 10 percent of directors in a third study could obtain company information through an online board portal.9

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

First, directors, managers and the corporate counsel may be cautious when it comes to altering the dynamics of the manager-director relationship. Enhanced information in the boardroom might encourage directors to aggressively challenge management’s assumptions and projections, thereby undermining a spirit of trust and openness. The relationship could even become counterproductive and adversarial, with board members reacting more like managers than overseers.10 Second, exposure to more information may pose difficulties for directors, as we discovered in a recent focus group of independent directors. Adding more required information—whether in the form of additional details on financial figures, third-party analyst reports or peer comparisons—may further overburden directors. The focus group underscored that directors do not always feel they have the specialized skills and knowledge required to understand and interpret more information. For example, tools that made it possible for them to test different strategic scenarios or financial maneuvers might be beyond the competence of some board members. Altering the method and format of information delivery—for example, switching from physical board books to an online portal—might raise concerns about directors’ computer literacy and the platform’s security.

Third, boardroom behavior is often shaped by cultural norms that are slow to change. In our conversations with directors, we repeatedly heard how the culture of a board determines its propensity to ask management additional questions. One board member revealed that it is typically the new directors, especially those who were recently in management, who are more likely to request further details – often to the consternation of more experienced directors. Barring new guidelines on information or internal crises that may serve as an immediate prompt for change, it is unlikely to expect most boards to closely examine the role of information in their decision making. We believe that these obstacles can be overcome when directors and managers work together to improve the board’s assessment of company performance – a key governance activity that relies heavily on an effective boardroom information strategy.

Boardroom information and performance management Directors and managers break free of the status quo by actively questioning whether the board can successfully assesses the company’s performance with the information it has. While directors will receive most of their information from management, this does not inherently mean that performance management at the board level is impossible. Rather, it’s the type of information that the board receives from management that can either greatly help or tremendously hinder their performance management efforts. At one extreme, if data is selectively and self-servingly chosen by management for presentation to the board, and the

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board’s impression of the data is largely defined by management analyses and explanations, then directors clearly cannot accurately assess the company’s performance. At the other extreme, however, if the board is overwhelmed with comprehensive yet raw data with little explanation, then effectively assessing the company’s performance would also be difficult. How can a company’s management and board avoid both of these traps? The core of any solid and healthy information relationship between management and directors is an agreement about performance metrics that are aligned with the company’s strategy. (See “What are the right metrics?”) When managers and board members come to an agreement about the most useful metrics to track and assess, the benefits to board-level performance management are threefold: 1. A rigorous discussion about the proper business metrics can serve to build trust between management and the board. 2. Basing their performance assessments on key performance metrics lessens the burden on the board to decode reams of data and at the same time frees them from a dependence on management’s analyses. 3. Knowing that management has a clear view of which performance metrics are most important to executing strategy or operations allows board members

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

to better focus their time and energies on the most important and pressing performance issues. Ideally, the metrics that are communicated to the board would be the same as those that management uses to assess company performance. According to John Mahoney, CFO and vice chairman of office products retailer Staples, “We use the same key performance indicators in our monthly board update that we use in our operating reviews with business units.” He believes that there are clear benefits to this practice: “If the board understands we are trying to help them understand the business, and [directors] effectively rely on our information, it facilitates a trustful conversation.” Building trust is only the beginning. When a company’s management and board have candid and direct conversations about the most appropriate performance metrics for the company’s strategy, it allows directors to weigh in constructively on issues of enterprise strategy and risk. Management can feel comfortable drawing on its directors’ collective insights, experience and judgment, and directors can be confident that the information they receive reflects the most critical and up-to-date performance metrics. Mahoney notes that the practice of sharing management’s key performance indicators with the board is relatively unusual. As the debate about information asymmetry climbs higher on the corporate governance agenda, however, more and more boards will be required to consider such solutions. Communicating key performance metrics to directors for board-level performance assessment

is a way of overcoming information asymmetry and its potentially negative consequences for director independence.

Technology solutions To effectively oversee the business, boards need management to grant them access to the right information. Once granted, new technology can help them obtain and use that information. It is inevitable that boardroom information will go on-line (once information security issues are addressed) and the use of interactive, mobile and social networking technologies rises. As a new generation of executives join boards, they will bring these tools and technologies with them. Scorecard or dashboard applications that are currently available can assist directors: visualization tools and alerts. (See “Visualizing a directors’ dashboard.”)

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What are the right metrics? Performance metrics are often a set of forward-looking indicators (strategic and operational, financial and nonfinancial) that best measure a company’s performance. While any company would want to track revenue, operating income and profits, the metrics that executives and directors might find most useful to track could vary substantially between industries: Operational metrics for a retail chain might include close-rates per number of customers who come into the stores, in-stock levels and speed of delivery rates. An energy company may focus its metrics on throughput diagnostics of its supply portfolio in order to maximize asset utilization of wells or mines. In high-tech manufacturing, critical metrics might include manufacturing defects, because of the costs involved in producing advanced technology products.

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

Visualizing a directors’ dashboard

Figure 2

When management enlists the board as a strategic advisor—that is, when it expands the range of discussion or review to include business strategy, competitor behavior, and how strategy is being translated into operational changes—it has the effect of reducing the potential size of disputed territory. The objective of a directors’ dashboard would be to increase the ability of the board to obtain access to both external and internal information and thus to make more effective decisions. (See Figure 2.)

When relevant information is coupled with the freedom to independently analyze data, directors can reduce the disputed territory between themselves and management and serve as advisors on a broader array of topics. Known to Unknown to Management Management 1 Known to board

100 50

150

2 0

Open discussion / review

Board as advisor

Disputed territory

Danger zone

200

Unknown to board 3 4

1. Conventional measures of financial performance augmented by balanced scorecard

3. Enhanced reporting of emerging internal issues that the board ought to know about and provide counsel on

2. Board commentary and advice augmented to include experiences in strategy and execution that bring greater insight to management

4. Enhanced reporting of emerging external issues that both management and the board ought to take into consideration

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Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

Visualization can take many forms, such as trend graphs or “heat maps” to indicate performance over time or to convey where concentrations of high and low performance lie on a given dimension such as customer segments. These tools give boards the ability to see the business at a glance based on the key performance indicators. Important performance information about products, customers and markets can be displayed for each business unit or for the corporation as a whole. Putting information at directors’ fingertips, in a format that helps them easily understand its implications, can prompt beneficial board discussions of strategy, risk and the best performance metrics for determining business success. Alerts at the board level can also be helpful. Just as stock-trading alerts are standard features that let investors know when stock prices dip below or rise above a certain threshold, alerts are increasingly being used to highlight exceptional situations. Such alerts allow management to quickly discern root causes and to devise a plan for action. Conceivably, management and boards could agree on alerts to notify themselves of a critical dip in performance and help them navigate unforeseen events and crises. Alerts, in effect, could help directors stay informed of potentially material events between board meetings. (See figures 3 and 4 for a screenshot of alerts and visualizations.) The information revolution in the boardroom will not stop there. In our recent focus group with directors, most board members expressed a desire to engage in electronic “what if” analyses using company data. This ability to query data would allow a board to

Figure 3: Alerts can help boards navigate unforeseen events and crises.

experiment with underlying assumptions that may otherwise be taken for granted, and also to understand the tradeoffs that may inherently exist when success on one performance metric means that another metric cannot be met. It would be interesting to know, for example, if the recent banking crisis could have been mitigated had boards run “what if” analyses with credit-crunch scenarios. Another development on the near horizon will be the growing ease with which directors will be able to instantaneously access outside information and incorporate it into their assessments and decision making. Company disclosures in new digital formats, for example, may increasingly allow directors to retrieve and compare their competitors’ financial disclosures without the need for extensive manipulation. These electronic disclosures might ultimately incorporate industryrelevant performance metrics, meaning

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that other perspectives on the business—for example, those that focus on customers, talent or operations—could be considered and compared in addition to financial performance. The ability to bring independent information to bear on boardroom decision making will further increase the value and utility of boards as effective overseers, and at the same time bolster their ability to add value in discussions of external factors such as competitor strategies. Far from thick board books and rigid PowerPoint presentations, technology solutions such as these can present relevant information to directors in a format that stimulates conversations that go beyond simple compliance. Technology can allow boards to more effectively participate in discussions of relevant performance metrics, company strategy and enterprise risks.

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

Figure 4: Visualizations and “what if” scenarios can prompt beneficial board discussions of strategy, risk and which performance metrics should be analyzed to determine the business’s success. Consider this hypothetical example. A North American consumer-goods company is considering expansion into Asia. To help advise executives on planning choices, directors could use a dashboard that included visualization and “what if” scenarios. As part of the evaluation process, they could test the country-based expansion options on a variety of measures to obtain predicted returns on invested capital according to different assumptions.

To do so they would do the following: 1. Select the targeted geographic area—Asia, in this case. 2. Select a country, such as China. 3. Assess the critical market factors. For China, these would indicate that the country has a high risk profile for market entry because of the business, legal and regulatory risk environment, but also attractive factors such as a high rate of GDP growth, large population and many markets for the company’s goods and services. 4. Manipulate different assumptions to find an optimal return on invested capital.

“

Market Factors Target Market

China

Overall Entry Risk

High

GDP Growth %

12.00%

1,634,304,000

40%

Revenue

879,715,200

30% 20%

31.1%

10%

1,330,000,000

Addressable Markets 5,320 Tax Rate

ROIC %

Invested Capital

Gross Margin Population

Forecasted Return on Invested Capital with China Investment

“What If”

40.00%

SG&A

16.4%

0% 1

Market Share

37.8%

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2

3

4

5 Years

Tomorrow’s Corporate Boardroom: Information, Performance Management and Technology · June 2008

Conclusion Today’s corporate board has responded to pressure from legislators, regulators, investors and listed exchanges to enshrine independence as a major principle of effective governance. Tomorrow’s corporate board, by contrast, will be expected not only to be independent in terms of its composition, but also to act independently. Information asymmetry between management and the board is one of the major stumbling blocks along this path: so long as directors rely on management for data and analysis, they

About the authors Robert J. Thomas is the executive director of the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business in Boston. Michael Schrage is a research fellow at the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Joshua B. Bellin is a senior research associate with the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business in Boston. George Marcotte is a senior manager with the Accenture Finance and Performance Management service line in Boston.

can neither make decisions independently nor effectively monitor company performance. For this reason, we believe that the definition of “independence” for boards will increasingly come to include the availability and use of independent information and analyses. Addressing information asymmetry and enhancing performance management at the board level go hand in hand. Tomorrow’s corporate boards should more actively add value to the companies they oversee. Not only might directors engage management in conversations about the most useful performance metrics to track, but they could also use those metrics to interact with management on broader issues of

strategy and risk. Far from being backseat managers, however, directors could be strategic advisors, capable of anticipating management’s blind spots and offering advice based on their personal experiences in strategy and execution. Technology tools that support the information needs of directors will play a prominent role in decision making, both inside and outside of the boardroom.

Notes

software, cutting out laborious and costly

1 Richard Hardin and Judith A. Roland, “Board

processes of manual re-entry and comparison.”

Work Processes” in David Nadler, Beverly Behan, and Mark Nadler, eds., Building Better Boards:

See http://www.xbrl.org . 7 2004 USC/Mercer Delta Corporate Board

A Blueprint for Effective Governance (San

Survey Results », March 2005, Online :

Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), p.86.

http://www.oliverwyman.com/ow/pdf_files/un_

2 See Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, “Agency Theory: An Assessment and Review,” Academy of Management Reveiw 14 no. 1 (1989). See also Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a

Board_Survey_2005.pdf (accessed 03/05/08). 8 ”The State of the Corporate Board, 2007: A McKinsey Global Survey,” p.3. 9 “2007 Public Company Governance Survey,” National Association of Corporate Directors, 2007, p.41. 10 Jay Conger, Edward Lawler, and David Finegold,

Profession (Princeton: Princeton University

Corporate Boards: New Strategies for Adding

Press, 2007), pp. 317-26.

Value at the Top (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,

3 Peter Hahn, “Blame the Bank Boards,” The Wall Street Journal, 11/28/07 4 ”What Directors Think,” Corporate Board Member, 2006 Special Supplement p.5. 5 See Paul MacAvoy and Ira Millstein, The Recurrent Crisis in Corporate Governance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p.5. 6 For example, Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) promises to automate the “processing of business information by computer

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2001), pp. 83-4.

About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Committed to delivering innovation, Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With deep industry and business-process expertise, broad global resources and a proven track record, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills and technologies to help clients improve their performance. With more than 175,000 people in 49 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$19.70 billion for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2007.

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About the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business The Accenture Institute for High Performance Business creates strategic insights into key management issues through original research and analysis. Its management researchers combine world-class reputations with Accenture’s extensive consulting, technology and outsourcing experience to conduct innovative research and analysis into how organizations become and remain high-performance businesses.