THE HQ COMPANIES ARTICLES

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► 1. PREPARE. Look at your LinkedIn, your board bio, and board resume—are they up to par? If not, correct ASAP so that you shine wherever you go and with whomever you talk to this summer.
Check out my LinkedIn FEATURED section on 3 BOARD MATERIALS SUCCESS TIPS for suggestions.

► 2. UNPLUG. Research all the way back to Henry Ford’s days shows that productivity and performance increase if you turn off work for a while. UC Berkeley neuroscientists’ research shows that shutting down your computer, smartphones, and tech devices will further increase your productivity and performance when you return.
Board work/interactions require you to be at your best, so plan to take time off and offline.

► 3. MINGLE. Meet people instead. To gain the most, think about how each person is connected to what boards and come prepared to lightly mention, when appropriate, what boards you’re interested in, your board value proposition, etc.
Listening and providing connections/information useful to further others’ interests improves the likelihood that others will support your efforts.

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AI has the power to grow or destroy your CEO/CFO/COO/CMO/GC career. Using an inexpensive, easy-to-implement “sniff test” before allowing any big data/AI generated information into your company’s financial, legal, operational, and/or marketing databases can keep your career (and your company), your health, and maybe even your life from joining the AI casualty list that includes:

• The CEO, COO, President, and Counsel of Sports Illustrated were fired—and the Sports Illustrated publisher lost its licensing—after publishing several articles with fake author names and headshots from an AI-generated image website.

• Six U.S. lawyers were sanctioned for citing several previous court cases proving precedence that emerged as fake AI-ChatGPT cases. The judge stated that ethics rules impose on attorneys “to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”

• Mayo Clinic and American Society for Health-Systems Pharmacists’ Long Island University’s research have discovered the following regarding ChatGPT advice: the answers for medical, pharmaceutical, suicide, addiction, and sexual assault questions are often incomplete, inaccurate, or even dangerous to a person’s health if followed.

WORSE, ChatGPT fabricates realistic “deceptive forgeries of scientific references, even listing the names of real authors with previous publications in scientific journals.”

Something needs to be done that will keep such information out of your company’s databases where it will be used to create systems, products, services, marketing materials, strategies, etc. that could be based on false information. ...

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Risk is like a wildfire—it shoots up in multiple locations and spreads quickly. You think that you have it contained, then BOOM, there it is again. In environments that have hot dry seasons, fire crews are on standby, totally prepared to extinguish fires. Yet over 70% of non-financial corporations do NOT have a Chief Fire Officer, aka Chief Risk Officer (CRO), reporting to the CEO and part of the Executive Team (GC [compliance/legal], CFO [finance], CISO [data & systems], CHRO [people], etc.). ...

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The Echo Effect is real and quite dangerous to your career growth, especially because the world is now so connected and in such rapid flux. An Echo Effect occurs when a group of individuals have the same shared traits, which means that no matter how many people are in the group, their similarities will result in their opinions and biases echoing the same sentiments, which may or may not be reflective of the larger environment facing you as a member of a Subject Matter Expert (SME) team, a department, the company, and/or its board.

Your career growth is dependent upon the contribution you make as a SME, within your department, towards your corporation’s goals, and/or to your corporate board’s strategies.

QUESTION: How many people—and which people—do you talk to before you form your insights, provide your recommendations to your team, your department head, your corporate leaders, your board? ...

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1. The risk of unmet stakeholder expectations is incinerating business value.

2. Enterprise risk professionals recognize that it is vital to understand the expectations of stakeholders, which is only possible via the reporting of knowledgeable staff who have their fingers on the pulses of those stakeholders. These critical reporting processes are vulnerable to human frailties, such as the biases of management.

3. There is a path to mitigate human capital systemic bias, ensuring more reliable enterprise intelligence for the purposes of reputation risk management. This path is built around three core actions: ...

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“You don’t exist if no one can see you.” Fred Luthans’s research shows that this quote applies to corporate leaders, since:

• Managers who get promoted most quickly in an organization are NOT the managers who do the best job.


• The big difference between Successful Managers (those who get promoted fast) and Effective Managers (those with the highest quantity / quality work AND highest employee satisfaction / commitment ratings) is that:
  
  ► Successful Managers spend 48% of their time networking, i.e., “socializing, politicking, interacting with outsiders.” Effective Managers spend 11% of their time networking.
  ► Getting promoted quickly in a company results from time spent with bosses / outside influencers.
  
  ► Effective Managers spend 44% of their time communicating, i.e., “explaining their decisions and seeking information from colleagues / employees.” Successful Managers spend 28% of their time communicating.
  ► Delivering the highest corporate productivity / lowest turnover results in fewer, slower promotions.

Both Successful Managers and Effective Managers also lose big time with above behaviors because: ...

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