Blind Spots, Biases and Other Pathologies in the Boardroom

Blind Spots, Biases and Other Pathologies in the Boardroom

Kenneth A. Merchant and Katharina Pick

Print Price: 
$27.95
E-book Price: 
$15.00
In Stock: 
June 24, 2010
Number of Pages: 
151
Print ISBN: 
978-1-60649-070-9
E-book ISBN: 
978-1-60649-071-6

In this book we show how seemingly ideal boards, those with “best practice” size, composition, and structure, can still fail to provide good governance simply because they fall victim to problems inherent in all groups. While having groups of board members provide corporate oversight is probably necessary, and even advantageous in some respects, groups have a dark side too. Tendencies that occur in group behavior can destroy or obscure the talents even of highly intelligent, energetic, and well-intended individuals, causing collective blind spots, biases, and inefficiencies that can render boards ineffective. Groups often perceive risks differently from the way individual group members do and collectively fail to see problems where they really exist.

Desk Copies

If you are a professor or instructor interested in using this title in your course, please fill out our desk copy request form and we will send you a copy.

Kenneth A. Merchant

Ken Merchant

Ken Merchant, holder of the Deloitte & Touche LLP Chair of Accoutancy at the University of Southern California, has been doing performance measurement-related research for over 30 years. He has authored eight books, including Management Control Systems: Performance Measurement, Evaluation and Incentives (published by Pearson/Financial times), scores of articles, and over 100 teaching cases on the topic. Professor Merchant has won multiple research awards. He serves on 11 academic editorial boards.

Katharina Pick

Katharina Pick has been engaged in research on corporate boards since 1998. She has interviewed over 100 directors, written seven Harvard Business School (HBS) case studies on corporate governance, provided fieldwork for two books on boards (Back to the Drawing Board, Carter and Lorsch 2004; Building Better Boards, Nadler, Behan, and Nadler 2005), and conducted two original qualitative research studies on boards for her PhD work.