Board of Directors Counseling

On over 20 occasions, following his participation in a Board Committee meeting, Gib Hedstrom has met in Executive Session with the outside directors (The CEO and other members of management leave the room.) These discussions tend to be brief as they focus on addressing the question: “Is there anything else we should know about or be thinking about?”

In 2015, Gib Hedstrom spent a half day with the full Board of Directors of a major North American utility company. At the core of the workshop was a carefully designed scenario-planning exercise. Board members and the executive leadership team rolled up their sleeves and worked through a variety of plausible scenarios about future “high-impact / high-vulnerability” mega-trends impacting their business.

Building on that meeting, the Board increasingly has taken leadership of the sustainability agenda. The sustainability director was moved to strategic planning and the CEO changed the corporate planning approach from the traditional one-shot annual event into a series of 12 monthly sessions across the year.

Working closely with The Conference Board, we have been a major contributor to the 2016 research called “The Seven Pillars of Sustainability Leadership.” This report focuses predominantly on the Board and C-suite governance activities that demonstrate leadership. Previously, we conceived and led a major global study on “Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability Governance,” published in 2011 by The Conference Board. We oversaw the year-long effort in: designing the survey and working closely with The Conference Board’s professional research team to craft the survey questions, conduct the survey, and summarize the results in a 25-page Council Perspectives document.

We conducted an environmental governance review for the CEO of a major steel company. Our work involved competitive benchmarking, best practice assessment across industries, executive interviews, and analysis using our time-tested Sustainability Scorecard^TM. Following our review, the CEO made the decision to implement each of our recommendations.

We were invited to be one of two outside experts on a newly established Sustainability Advisory Board for a major chemical company. Working with a team of internal senior executives, we constructed a path forward that is robust, strategic, and credible.