Kathryn Bishop CBE has served on boards in England and Wales in the public and charity sectors, including at the UK Intellectual Property Office, the Border Agency and Welsh Government as well as in schools and at university level. As an Associate Fellow at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, she works with boards of global organisations.

The crucial conversations every board should be having. Discover how as a board member, you can know what's really going on, and what you can do about it.

An accessible guide to the business of being a board director, through the lens of 18 crucial conversations. How do you understand what is really going on in an organisation, so you can exercise the oversight that is required from you? How do you overcome the information asymmetry problem, where the executive directors know more about the operation than you do? How will you collaborate as a board to set the right strategic direction in a context that changes constantly? How will you see the organisation through the eyes of your advisors, your employees and your key stakeholders? How can you manage the risks you know about as well as the ones you don't? Your best tool for all of this is conversation - about the right topics, with the right people, at the right time. This book shows you what these conversations need to cover and how to make them count. Whether you are a new director of a PLC, a long-standing Trustee of a charity, or a governor of an educational institution, this book will help you and your colleagues become the board your organisation needs. Kathryn Bishop and Gillian Camm each have many decades operating at board level in listed and private companies, charities, government boards, professional services firms and educational establishments. They have blended this with their experience of selecting, developing, and teaching non-executives, and underpinned it with a carefully curated selection of the most relevant and usable board research together with their own research insights.