Are Boards Quietly Moving Beyond the Woke Era?

Are boards quietly moving beyond the woke era? It’s an interesting question. The honest answer is: perhaps. But it’s a mixed picture and it’s contentious, so before we continue I want to make it clear I have no personal agenda.

As someone with a highly commercial background who now mostly works for social and nonprofit organizations, I just want to make sure we all serve society and its best interests, whatever those might be.

In Chapter 6 of my book Risk, Opportunity & Performance: The Art of Taking Worthwhile Risk, I examine how boards are regulated, the internal dynamics that shape their operations, and the cultures that influence their decision-making processes.

To conclude the chapter, I decided to search for best practice and mega-trends in companies’ annual reports. My initial analysis spanned 2019 to 2024 and included fast-growing technology firms, established corporations, banks, nonprofit social enterprises, and international organizations.

I have recently updated my research, and recent developments are proving to be even more fascinating.

Clearly, when reading these documents, the financial numbers are important. That’s obvious, but they are only backward-looking. When looking to the future and the prospects for growth and improvement, it was hard to make sense of the text.

North American SOX-driven 10-K reports frequently include helpful statements of intent. However, their risk assessments sounded like unstructured lists of concerns dictated by a corporate lawyer undergoing therapy.

European and Pacific Rim reports were much wordier and more structured – but what did it all mean?

In a desperate hunt for insight, I eventually resorted to undertaking word counts. I have to say I was skeptical this would be of value, but as it turned out it was more interesting than I had expected.

On a practical level, counting words in documents with modern tools and even AI sounds easy, but it isn’t. Furthermore, key words such as ‘income,’ ‘profit’, and ‘sustainability’ are used in different ways in different geographies.

I struggled to find insight into how boards approached risk-taking and opportunity selection, but I did manage to develop some insight into how boards responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and their appetite for issues such as diversity and inclusion and climate change.

In this article I summarize my conclusions, but in a future edition of Connect, I will publish the data and more details of the conclusions – and  you decide for yourself.