Most writing about boards focuses on governance. You know…Independence. Committees. Oversight. Fiduciary responsibility.
And while all of that is correct, looking through that lens gives you an impression of the board itself: the individuals themselves — not the reason they are there. For example, if you own stock, you often get the notice of the meeting to “vote” for the board of directors. Have you ever seen such a solicitation with a recommendation to vote AGAINST someone being nominated by the board?
You won’t.
But what you should realize is that looking at boards by who is on the board – rather than why they are there – never explains how decisions actually get made. And these decisions by boards are profound in their implications.
Because boards don’t spend their time thinking about governance. They spend their time managing pressure. And the truth is, we’re all under pressure these days – a lot of it.
We Started Modeling Pressure Instead of Writing About It
In our work, we stopped describing roles and started modeling the environments where these roles operate. Not what a facility manager is supposed to do or what an engineer is responsible for, but rather:
- what pressures they operate under
- what tradeoffs they face
- where systems hold—and where they break
That shift in our lens changed how we looked at everything. And that includes boards.
The Myth of the “Balanced Board”
The conventional view of a board of directors is that boards are built for balance:
- financial expertise
- operational experience
- industry knowledge
- governance oversight
This “balance is often summarized in a “skills matrix.”
Aristotle taught us the “Golden Mean” – balance. It’s better to stay in the middle than on either end.
And while that sounds perfect, the world is never in balance. Have you examined Nature lately?
That’s why taking traditional looks at the composition of a board of directors misses something more fundamental.
Boards are not balanced. They are weighted — weighted toward the pressures that matter most to the business model they are trying to advise.
Every Board Solves the Same Problem—Differently
Across industries, the same categories of concern appear over and over:
- capital
- operations
- commercial reality
- risk
- change
Every board must contend with them. Every board member is brought in and will be slotted into one of these categories. But the categories do not change as you go from board to board. What changes is the center of gravity—the pressure that ultimately shapes decisions and the discussions that surround board meetings.
You see, it’s all about pressure, or the continuous physical force exerted on or against a business by something in contact with it. That “something” (depending on the company the board is serving) might be more heavily weighted in one or more of those categories.
In a commodity business, that “something” is often the market itself. Pricing moves. Input costs rise. Demand softens. The company doesn’t control any of it. Pressure builds not from internal ambition, but from external constraint—forcing decisions around cost, production, and capital discipline just to remain viable.
In a pharmaceutical company, the pressure comes from uncertainty. Years of research. Billions in capital. No guarantee of approval. Regulation stands between discovery and revenue. Here, pressure is not about efficiency—it is about whether the entire system produces a viable outcome at all.
In a service-based business, pressure is operational. Contracts must be fulfilled. Systems must perform. Failures are immediate and visible. There is little room for delay or error. The pressure is constant, and the expectation is reliability—not breakthrough.
A Different Way to Read a Board
Instead of asking, “Who is on the board?” we should be asking, “What pressure(s) are they there to represent?” From that perspective, a board’s composition becomes easier to interpret — Not as a list of credentials, but as a map of how decisions are weighted and made.
For example, take Pfizer Inc. The dominant pressures for this company are not operational efficiency or pricing power. The pressures are:
- scientific uncertainty
- regulatory approval
- long-cycle capital risk
In such an environment, the board composition (and you can check them out in their annual report) begins to make more sense than a random list of names pulled from who knows where. In fact, once you understand these pressure points, the composition of their board makes perfect sense. You see:
- regulatory expertise
- scientific leadership capable of evaluating breakthrough research
- capital allocators comfortable with long time horizons
- operators who understand commercialization after approval
Indeed, that board composition is not driven by preference—it is driven by necessity. In other words:
Capital follows science.
Commercial activity follows approval.
Risk is not operational—it is existential.
Remove those pressure types, and the board would be misaligned with the business—even if it appeared “balanced” on paper. The board reflects this reality.
Contrast: A Board Built Around Execution
Now consider a capital-intensive industrial business. Here, the pressures shift:
- cost structure
- commodity cycles
- global supply chains
- capital discipline
Innovation is incremental.
Commercial power is limited.
The system is governed by efficiency and timing.
The board composition changes accordingly. That “change” is what happens to boards throughout businesses – or not. If it does happen, the board is shaped to deal with the pressures of the business. If it does not happen, then eventually that business will fail.
Consider Eastman Kodak. This is one of the cleanest illustrations of what we’re describing. Kodak was not unaware of digital photography. In fact: it invented the digital camera (1970s).
The pressure was clear:
film → declining
digital → emerging
consumer behavior → shifting
This pressure was not hidden. The dominant pressure had shifted to: innovation + business model transformation. The pressure changed. The weighting did not.
But Kodak’s structure—at both management and board level—remained heavily aligned to film economics (boy, did they sell a lot of film). Imagine being on the board and having your core revenue generator threatened to become extinct. What would YOU do?
Legacy revenue protection. Many companies find it difficult to abandon their legacy streams of income, even when faced with annihilation. Perhaps that is part of human psychology. In any case, that’s what happened to Eastman Kodak. Digital was delayed, not embraced and their core business eroded allowing competitors to move faster. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Most Analysis Stops at the Surface
When boards are evaluated, the discussion usually centers on:
- independence
- diversity
- tenure
- governance practices
These are visible. But they don’t explain behavior.
Pressure does.
Pressure is also where the connection to operating roles becomes clear.
Facility managers, engineers, operators—they experience pressure directly:
- systems failing
- budgets tightening
- timelines compressing
Boards don’t experience those pressures. They interpret them. Or, they are forced to interpretation, which largely comes from the backgrounds of the companies from which they were recruited. They decide:
- which pressures matter most
- which ones to prioritize
- which ones to absorb
The structure is the same. The vantage points are different.
If you understand the pressures acting on a board, you begin to see:
- which decisions are likely
- which tradeoffs will dominate
- where resistance will come from
- where change is possible
Before anything is announced publicly, knowing the composition of the board’s backgrounds can ground you into not only deeper analysis, but what every company is looking for: predictability.
For example, there are some organizations that bring CEOs into a room to help CEOs understand “best practices.” These meetings generally are geared around a question or two, which all the members of that meeting “weigh in” with their experiences. Hearing what others have done in situations you might be facing gives you “insider information” that you might be able to apply to your own pressure point.
Board members act like this with the company for which they are recruited. Because boards don’t decide in abstraction. They decide inside constraints.
The More Useful Question
The question is not then is not who sits on the board? The question is: “What pressure are they there to represent—and how much weight does it carry?”
Board composition is one of the few places where a company’s internal priorities are publicly visible.
Not in what is said. But in what is represented. Boards are often described as governing bodies.
That’s true. But it’s not how they operate. They are better understood as: systems for interpreting and prioritizing pressure. And once you see them that way, their composition stops being abstract. It becomes predictive.
So the next time you’re asked to vote on a board of directors, take a closer look at the composition of the members. It may explain far more about the company’s performance than anything else you’re shown.