Market Roundup: The new skills corporate board members need

The specialization trend among corporate board members

It is not only a matter of perception: the world is increasingly polarized and tech-driven, bringing about new needs regarding large companies’ governance. Overlapping crises are now a reality, and businesses must also deal with that.  

State of play. The intensification of the U.S.-China tensions following the Covid crisis, Ukraine’s invasion by Russia, and now the Israel-Palestine conflict. As geopolitical risk has increasingly moved up the list of CEOs’ top concerns, it has also gained more importance on the board’s agenda. 

• According to a recent survey by Ernst & Young (EY) conducted in the Americas, political risk ranks seventh on a list of worrying topics and is gaining more and more importance, being cited by 45 percent of the board members interviewed — up 16 percentage points from the previous year’s survey.
• In Brazil, the issue was cited by 42 percent of executives. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s recent attempts to interfere in the composition of the boards of the oil giant Petrobras and the mining company Vale also contribute to this perception domestically.

Why it matters. If previously corporate boards were formed by generalists with a relationship with the organization’s control group, now, with the evolution of the market and governance rules, the participation of external and independent advisors is growing. “It is with them that companies are seeking...