4), directors Sherrese Smith, managing partner at Paul Hastings, and Emily Heath, who formerly held C-suite cybersecurity roles at United Airlines and DocuSign, credit the board’s global nature for the company’s recent successful, yet complicated, $8 billion acquisition of Avast, a consumer cybersecurity firm based in the Czech Republic. “For a company competing in a global marketplace, making sure that voices around the table are not just an echo chamber, but bring to the table the rich diversity of their life experiences, enables our board to be strategic.” Gathering diverse views, she adds, allows boards to look past the next quarterly earnings and ask, “What’s our moonshot?”Īt Gen Digital (No. Diversity of all kinds is a strength, she says. government and reading the geopolitical climate. 22) and CEO of the Obama Foundation, tells Fortune that her experience in the Obama White House-Jarrett was a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama through his two terms in office-meant that she arrived at the fashion retailer steeped in knowledge about working with the U.S. Valerie Jarrett, a director at Ralph Lauren (No. Top boards also prize diverse experiences and expertise. F5 also recruited a diverse set of directors who have, in turn, helped attract key executives to the company, the CEO says. At the time, he says, “I felt strongly that the technology industry at large had been apathetic to the issue of creating more diverse and inclusive environments.” He inherited a C-suite that lacked diversity now, half his executive team hails from underrepresented populations. He took over F5 in 2017, joining the board that same year. Locoh-Donou himself grew up in Togo, was educated in France, and holds an MBA from Stanford University. Locoh-Donou is one of 11 directors on the F5 board, seven of whom identify as part of an underrepresented group. But the idea that gender, racial, ethnic, age, and other forms of diversity are competitive differentiators is now self-evident to today’s top directors, including François Locoh-Donou, CEO of F5, the Seattle-based cybersecurity firm that tops our list this year. True, some external structures have moved boards to embed diversity and inclusion into good governance. Modern boards are diverseĭiversity in the boardroom, though still aspirational at many companies, has become table stakes. In conversations with CEOs and board members of this year’s ranking companies, Fortune also found that while there isn’t one board that’s fully emblematic of a “modern” template, there are recurring themes among the top companies. Boards of every category are progressing toward an updated model, if at different speeds. In the end, no single industry was found to dominate the list. This year’s ranking, published today, measures board independence, sustainability, diversity, financial performance, and more. To track how corporate governance-while still imperfect-is evolving, Fortune used information gathered by Diligent and ESG data from Refinitiv to quantify board success across several dimensions. Today, the best boards operate as an advisory team, almost player-coaches, who manage multiple pressures, including traditional expectations around increasing revenues and building strong leadership succession plans, but also newer requirements, such as shrinking a firm’s carbon footprint, boosting social equity, and complying with increased regulations. It acknowledges that, over the past decade, boards have largely shaken off their reputation as networks of powerful insiders with a profit motive as their sole North Star. Fortune’s Modern Board 25 launched last year to begin answering those questions.
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