Laura Liswood reflects on the challenges that directors face today and her experience at the 2022 Salzburg Global Corporate Governance Forum
On October 13, Salzburg Global Seminar hosted its latest Corporate Governance Forum. This year, the theme was Global Disruption and Uncertain Horizons: How can Boards Navigate New Risks. The Forum participants examined the role directors play in addressing converging crises and debated their changing roles and responsibilities in today’s times of uncertainty.
Salzburg Global spoke with Laura Liswood, secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders and former managing director of Goldman, Sachs & Co. about her thoughts on the challenges that directors face today and her experience at the Forum.
Salzburg Global: What are the key challenges that directors face today?
Laura Liswood: “I think that the key challenges that directors face today, first and foremost, are the just sheer complexity of ideas, sheer complexity of challenges, of risks almost beyond one individual to actually absorb and understand. And of course, for me, that direction into the thought process around diversity on boards and the essential necessity of having diversity because any one person just can't bring it all in, make sense of it, and know how to maximize best practices.”
SG: What do you think is something that people in your industry don’t talk about?
LL: “[In] the diversity, equity and inclusion industry, if we can call it that, I think that people don't really understand perhaps the difficulty to get to where they ostensibly think they want to go. I think that people think, ‘if we do a lot of programs, we must be a fair organization.’ And we're making progress and not realizing that there are sometimes confusing efforts with outcomes, you know, and intent with impact. There is a name for that now. It's called The Illusion of Inclusion.”
SG: What are your takeaways from the Corporate Governance Forum?
LL: “When one comes to a Forum like this, first and foremost, you are just gobsmacked by how smart people are, how much smarter they are than you. And so first, the kinds of connections that you make and the interesting people that you're meeting. And then obviously what you want to have happen, which is the kind of capturing of it by things like ‘I never thought of it that way’, ‘I never really understood that perspective’, or ‘boy, that's an idea that I could have sat on a desert island for a hundred years and not come up with’, but this person has obviously given it a great deal of thought. So that to me is the ultimate purpose of a hospitable place like the Global Seminar. You get to do that. No one is really judging, everyone is very open. Everyone is very curious. They're listening. You don't normally get that in the real world.”
