Podcast appearances and mentions of richard chait

In this session, originally recorded on October 25, 2021, we asked Owen Charters, President & CEO of BGC Canada, to present his five good ideas about how a board can be better. They say strategy starts with the board, but is that really true, and should it be? Whether you’re an executive director or CEO (including an aspiring one), managing a board is a skill that’s rarely taught, yet vital to any senior non-profit leader. In this Five Good Ideas session with Owen Charters, find out how a board can be better. What should it focus on, and what should it ignore? Build a great board so that governance adds real value to you and your organization. Learn what and how to present issues to your board. Discover five good ideas (and a few bad ones to avoid) to keep your board on track, ensuring they are a partner in guiding your organization on the toughest decisions, and uncover whether they really should be the seat of organizational strategy. Five Good Ideas 1. Guide and shape the work of the board in three key areas: policy, strategy, and generative governance; but remember, boards don’t DO strategy. 2. Boards manage and evaluate CEOs; but CEOs need to take the initiative to shape this work. 3. Boards should be diverse, but most importantly must be reflective of the community. 4. Boards need to be engaged – committees, education programs, mission connection, and as alumni. 5. Look to other sectors – there are good practices that we can emulate in the corporate sector around accountability and shaping the work of the board. Resources Muttart Foundation – Board Development Workbooks Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards. An excellent book by Dr. Richard Chait, Mr. William Ryan, and Ms. Barbara Taylor. Leading with Intent: BoardSource Index of Nonprofit Board Practices – access free and paid materials Deloitte – The Effective Not-for-Profit Board: A value-driving force Owen Charters’ article “Board Governance in Practice” (chapter 8) in Intersections and Innovations: Change for Canada’s Voluntary and Nonprofit Sector, published by the Muttart Foundation and Carleton University About Owen Charters Owen Charters is CEO of BGC Canada (formerly Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada). He serves on the advisory board of Common Good, a retirement plan for nonprofit sector employees, the Advisory Committee for the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities at Western University, and the board of the National Alliance for Children and Youth. Former Chair of Imagine Canada and the Human Resources Council on the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector, Owen is also faculty for the Social Sector Leadership MBA at York University’s Schulich School of Business. He is interested in pushing for a stronger nonprofit sector voice in Canadian policy, as well as better working conditions for sector employees.

Valeria Teles interviews Zach First on The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done by Peter Drucker Zach joined the Drucker Institute team in 2007, and was named executive director in 2016. Under his leadership, the Drucker Institute has created the annual Management Top 250 ranking in The Wall Street Journal, the S&P/Drucker Institute Corporate Effectiveness Portfolio with First Trust, the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society and the Bendable lifelong learning system. Zach has written for Harvard Business Review, S&P Indexology and Harvard Magazine, and contributed the afterword to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Peter Drucker's classic The Effective Executive. Previously, Zach served as the inaugural assistant dean at Olin College, which was founded in 2000 with a $430 million gift from the F. W. Olin Foundation in order to reinvent engineering education. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Haverford College, where his advisor was Lucius Outlaw, Jr. He earned his masters and doctorate degrees in higher education from Harvard University, with Richard Chait as his mentor. In 2020, Zach was named a visiting professor at Otemon Gakuin University in Osaka, Japan. He has served as a trustee and, from 2014–2018, president of the board of the Children's Center at Caltech, one of America's leading nonprofit providers of innovative STEM-based early childhood and preschool education. From 2013-2016, Zach was a member of the Board of Advisors at PayScale, creator of the world's largest database of individual compensation profiles. And from 2009-2011, he was a fellow of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education.   To learn more about Zach First and his work please visit: https://www.drucker.institute/   — This podcast is a quest for well-being, a quest for a meaningful life to the exploration of fundamental truths, enlightening ideas, insights on physical, mental, and spiritual health. The inspiration is Love. The aspiration is to awaken new ways of thinking that can lead us to a new way of being, being well.

In this must-listen episode for trustees and heads of school, Dr. Richard Chait highlights how boards can govern more effectively during times of crisis, the importance of the head of school/board partnership, and practical ways boards can work more generatively while balancing the short and long term needs of the school. Dr. Chait is Professor of Education, Emeritus, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has studied nonprofit governance for over 35 years and co-authored the seminal book Leadership as Governance: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards, as well as Improving the Performance of Governing Boards and The Effective Board of Trustees. Dr. Chait has served as a member of the board of directors of BoardSource and as a trustee on the executive committees of Goucher College, Maryville College and most recently, Wheaton College. He has provided consultation to the boards and executives of more than a hundred nonprofit organizations, particularly in education and the arts. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, he was a professor at the University of Maryland and at Case Western Reserve University and was formerly associate provost at Pennsylvania State University.

The Florida Legislature is facing a monumental challenge when it convenes in March: How to address a workers’ compensation insurance system which the Florida Supreme Court has determined to be “fundamentally unconstitutional” with respect to certain rights and remedies. Richard Chait and Kim Syfrett, both leaders with the Florida Justice Association and Florida Workers' Advocates, share their insight in this program on the Court’s rulings and the challenges faced by their clients who routinely face delay or denial of the provision of medical treatment and related benefits in what they view to be a “fractured system” in Florida. Chait details the Florida Justice Association’s four pillars geared toward positively reforming the system in this upcoming legislative session: 1. The need for transparency and competition in the ratemaking process 2. Some element of choice in the provision of medical treatment by the injured worker 3. Revitalization of the post-maximum medical improvement benefit for those who suffer career-altering injuries 4. Codify the Supreme Court’s decision in Castellanos to ensure access to court through reasonable attorney’s fees when benefits are wrongfully denied You’ll also hear about the ever-growing “cocoon of collateral interests” which has spun so tightly around the core principles of workers’ comp through the extensive reforms over the years that we can no longer appreciate its underlying intent – to make sure the injured employee is taken care of. Program Note: Personal injury law will be one of the major topics at the upcoming Florida Justice Association’s 2017 Workhorse Seminar in Orlando from Wednesday February 28th through Friday, March 3rd. Registration is available at www.FloridaJusticeAssociation.org

Noted Workers' Compensation attorneys Kim Syfrett and Richard Chait return to FJA Radio for a no-holds barred discussion in this second part of our Workers’ Compensation program to share their reaction to the Florida business community’s reform proposal to a system the state Supreme Court ruled last year as “fundamentally unconstitutional.”   In what they describe as a “shock to the conscience”, Kim and Richard reveal that the Associated Industries of Florida proposal would eliminate a more than 70 year-old carrier-paid obligation for attorney fees when benefits are wrongly denied.  Fourteen years of eroding workers’ benefits during past reforms and “incredulous profits by insurance companies” shares Richard,  has now created a situation where the only way to prevent total fracture of the system and fall into a tort system under the AIF proposal, would be to institute a bad faith remedy. “Essentially what the (business) industry is saying with this proposal is ‘We’re going to keep our right to choose your doctor, we’re going to keep our right to decide whether you get the medical treatment that doctor recommends, and when we decide that we don’t want to give it to you, we’re going to make you pay to show that we were wrong.  And there’s not going to be any consequence for our wrongful denial.’” - Attorney Kim Syfrett

Over the past month, we've talked with university presidents, trustees, and faculty, cultivating a dialog around building strong relationships between institutional leadership. In the face of strained board-president relationships, diffused shared governance practices, challenging financial and regulatory environment, stresses on the balance of leadership abound. In light of the search for this careful balance of accountability, authority, and responsibility at the top, our conversation today focuses on the role of the board in helping the institution improve its decision-making prowess, provide leadership and vision at the strategic level, and above all else, to be consequential in the ongoing development and growth of the institution. What does it take to build a consequential board? What should we expect of the board of 2020? And what sort of impact does the board need to have in higher education? This week we welcome Richard Chait to Navigating Change. Dr. Chait is Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and co-author of “Consequential Boards: Adding Value Where It Matters Most” published by AGB. Links & Notes Consequential Boards — AGB Report About Richard Chait Richard Chait (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin), Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Chair of COACHE's National Advisory Council, studies the management and governance of colleges and universities. Chait has expertise on terms and conditions of faculty employment, including promotion and tenure procedures, academic freedom, and faculty evaluation. He also studies the roles, responsibilities, and performance of boards of trustees, and has written on faculty work life. For over 20 years, Chait has taught in HGSE's summer institute programs for executives in higher education. He has been a professor at the University of Maryland and at Case Western Reserve University, and was formerly associate provost at Pennsylvania State University. In 2001, Chait was selected by the Fulbright New Zealand Board of Directors as a Fulbright U.S. Distinguished American Scholar. In 2005, Chait received the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) Academic Leadership Award and a Research Writing Award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). His recent books include Governance as Leadership (with W. Ryan and B. Taylor) (2004) and The Questions of Tenure, ed. (2002).