The average board meeting of a large company is a piece of theatre with a known script: ninety slides, four defensible answers, and a decision that was made in a corridor three weeks earlier. Everyone in the room knows this. Almost no one says it.
A growing cohort of chief executives has started saying it. Among them: a logistics founder in Rotterdam who replaced slide decks with pre-read memos and cut meeting time by seventy percent; a banking CEO in Singapore who seats directors by tenure of question, not tenure of title; and a manufacturing chief in Pune who holds one meeting a year walking the factory floor, phones surrendered at the gate.
“Information is abundant. What is scarce is candour.”
What unites them is not a shared methodology but a shared diagnosis. The board meeting was designed for an era of information scarcity, when directors genuinely did not know what was happening inside the company. That era is over. Information is now abundant; what is scarce is candour, and candour does not survive a ninety-slide deck.
The experiments are early and not all of them will survive contact with regulators and activist investors. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. The boardrooms that matter in ten years will be smaller, slower, stranger, and far more honest. The theatre is closing. The rehearsal for whatever replaces it has already begun.
