Boards and the future: encouraging innovation, adding value to entrepreneurs, and preparing for the future of work

Summary:
Shuo Chen provides her thoughts on the Boards of the future and how they add value to entrepreneurs. Shuo Chen is General Partner at IOVC, Steering Committee Member at Google Female Founders, Board Advisor at Reed Smith LLP, IoTecha Corp, EY and Forbes China, Board Member at DECODE ®, Commissioner at California's Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission and Faculty Member at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, where she is also an advisory board member.

Main Body of Content:
Exploring numerous ways in which Boards will impact the future of high growth companies, Shuo Chen speaks to Nurole about how information should flow between management and the board, as well as how AI will impact the future of work.

➕ Information flows: “I've seen that entire [reporting] spectrum happen. But the [ideal] pattern here is always that the founder dictates that structure. So founders, I think, or CEOs, or board chairs, need to come in knowing what they want and set that example to the rest of the board to say, 'look, this is the [reporting] structure that we're going to follow.' … What doesn’t work well is the polar opposite of everything that I've shared, but particularly on structure, [which] … I've seen kill a lot of startup boards, where one time they're sending out some updates, and then they miss some updates, and other times they expect a completely different meeting structure."

➕ AI: “First … understand the exact impact of AI, what parts of the job is it augmenting? And then the second step is figuring out, now that more of our time is freed up with AI automating a lot of the boring and tedious tasks, what do we do with all the new time that opens up? What are the unique roles that we need to be up-skilling towards, and how can we be better designing the work, the workforce, and the workplace to adapt to this new time that opens up, so that we can build deeper personal relationships with each other … our clients and our customers, and be more deeply involved in understanding how to make complex strategic decisions across a very different stakeholder group.”

➕ Innovation committees: “The second question is, when I'm thinking about the makeup of any board, ‘is there an innovation committee? Is there one specific committee that is dedicated to this?’ You don't necessarily need to have [no] corporate individuals [on the board], but is there a strategic advisory board that's dedicated to thinking about questions of technology? Or if there is no board level representation that focuses on this topic, then at least doing some sort of board level education.”

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