Gartner’s “Best Practices in Creating Effective Board Agendas” includes many sound tips for developing annual board and committee meeting calendars, building and organizing meeting agendas, and developing meeting preread materials. The sample decision tree (below) is designed to facilitate the corporate governance professional’s decision making about whether particular contemplated meeting agenda items should be added to the board or a committee meeting agenda or consent agenda and/or information-only board materials.
Additional takeaways include snippets of a sample annual board meeting calendar and a sample meeting agenda and meeting preread and report checklists.
Editor’s Note: In April 2024, the Society’s Corporate Practices Committee, in collaboration with Board Intelligence, launched a new initiative—informed by a working group of public company, private company, and nonprofit members—to develop guidance for our members aimed at helping them assess and improve the processes surrounding the development and content of their board materials. This initiative is planned to generate, among other resources, benchmarking data, written “good practices” guidance, samples and templates, and relevant programming. Stay tuned!