Fastest Selling Book on Boards Now Canadian Bestseller

The Imperfect Board Member, by Canadian author and board governance consultant Jim Brown, has just become a national bestseller. The book on board governance hit bookstore shelves in October 2006 and has been at or near the top of the Amazon.ca charts for business books for the last six weeks. There are over 500,000 business books listed on Amazon.ca.

The Imperfect Board Member is a leadership fable in the vein of Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Ken Blanchard’s The One Minute Manager—authors who have both endorsed Brown’s book. Lencioni says, “Finally! A book about boards that isn’t boring!” Readers have been pleasantly surprised that a topic that has been discussed so dryly comes alive in this refreshing book. In it, fictional CEO David Slater learns to interact with the board of directors of his publicly-traded company “Communitrek.” At the same time he joins a non-profit board of directors. Through challenges and plenty of mistakes, he discovers how to be an effective board member with guidance from fellow director, Trevor McAllister. The back section of the book summarizes and provides resources regarding the board governance principles illustrated through the fable.

So why do so many people care about board governance? Veteran director and author of two books and many articles on the art of directorship, Bill Dimma has served on fifty-five corporate boards and forty-five not-for-profit boards. He says, “The Imperfect Board Member equips directors and CEOs to pursue the increasingly high standards of corporate leadership demanded by society in general, and investors in particular, as a consequence of too many corporate debacles in recent years.” Dimma estimates that one in five corporate board members have been involved in a directors’ and officers’ lawsuit. The risks are high and there is significant pressure to improve.

There are millions of board members in Canada who govern the over 161,000 non-profit organizations, 3,830 publicly traded companies, as well as the thousands of privately-run incorporated businesses. Brown finds that boards are usually made up of competent people who do not always function well together. “Effective boards trust each other and enter into the kind of constructive conflict that enables them to come up with the best solutions to problems,” says Brown. Healthy boards also hold each other accountable to group performance standards and policies. There is a balance between trusting the senior management of a corporation or non-profit and having enough accountability in place to make sure the organization is being managed properly. Brown’s fictional board guru, Trevor, says, “Board members need to keep their noses in the business and their fingers out.”