I’ve been on a lot of boards. I’m still on a lot of boards. And I’ve been thinking about boards a lot as I work on my next book Startup Boards: Recreating the Board of Directors to Be Relevant to Entrepreneurial Companies.

I used to think every board needed a chairman and early in my investing career I was often this chairman (or co-chairman). At some point I began feeling like the chairman role in a private company both undermined the CEO and sent the wrong signal to the employees of the company, and I preferred that the CEO be the chairman. I also started disliking being the chairman, as it seemed to create a view that I had some kind of ultimate power and responsibility for the company that I rarely had, and that almost always belonged to the CEO. So I stopped being chairman and in a number of cases refused to be called it, even when I played the role of it. The one exception I made was non-profits, where chairman seems to have a somewhat different connotation. And since I’ve decided not to be on public company boards, I don’t have to make a decision in that context.

Several years ago I started using, and encountering, the phrase “lead director” more frequently. Recently, I decided it’s the right one and have used it to replace chairman in my vocabulary. And, when asked the question, “does a private company board need a chairman”, I now say “no, but it needs a lead director.”

The lead director is responsible for working with the CEO to manage the board of directors. The lead director is always the most active director and in many cases represents the largest non-founder shareholder in the company when a company is private. The lead director is not the communication conduit to the CEO – every director interacts directly with the CEO – but the lead director gets involved in any conflict between a director and the CEO, any concerns that arise, and any conflicts between directors. And the lead director helps the CEO manage the board meetings.

The lead director should be the CEO’s board confidant, organizer, and conflict resolver. I sort of like the word consigliere, as used in The Godfather, a lot, although it has both obvious negative connotations and a different actual function in real life than the one represented in the film, so I’m searching for a better one.

When I look at the boards I’m currently on, I play this role in many, but not all of them. And the phrase feels correct to me.

Do you have a lead director on your board? How about a chairman? What do they do and how does it feel? And is there a better word than consigliere?

I joined my first board of a company other than mine in 1994 (NetGenesis). Since then, I’ve sat on hundreds of boards and been to a zillion board meetings. It crushes my soul a little to think of the number of board meetings I have sat through that were ineffective, poorly run, or just plain boring. I guess that’s part of the motivation I have in writing Startup Boards: Reinventing the Board of Directors to Be Useful to the Entrepreneur (the next book in the Startup Revolution series which should be out sometime this summer.)

In the mean time, over the past two years I’ve done a lot of experiments with the boards I’m on. I’ve tried a lot of different things – some that are awesome, some that don’t matter, some that suck, and some that have been epic fails. For any that aren’t awesome, I’ve tried to kill the experiment quickly so it didn’t hurt anything and when I reflect on everything I’ve tried I think I’ve managed to “do no harm”, which is more than I can say for a lot of the other VCs who I’ve sat on boards with since 1994.

By this summer, I expect I’ll have a very clear view on the best practices from my perspective for making a Startup Board effective. Until then, I’m still running experiments, or experiencing experiments that the entrepreneurs run. And I’m thinking out loud (including in posts like this) on what has worked and hasn’t worked.

One of the things I’ve played around with is the board package. The number of different formats, styles, information incorporated, and distribution methods over the years boggles my mind. I not-so-fondly remember toting around “binders full of board meeting material” in the 1990s. Or pre-Gmail having a “board meeting folder” in Outlook so I could quickly find the upcoming board meeting documents. Or fighting through 19 attachments to an email to figure out where the actual board material was. PowerPoints, PDFs, Word documents, text files, Excel spreadsheets, Prezi docs, videos, email outlines – the list goes on.

Recently, I had a magical moment. I’m a huge believer in distributing the board material a few days in advance, having all the board members comment on it in advance of the meeting, and then having the meeting without going through the board material page by page. No death by endless Powerpoint, no reading a document I’ve already read. My favorite board meetings are the “one slide board meeting” where the only piece of paper allowed in the room is the agenda of the meeting.

When entrepreneurs don’t get this, I suggest that they pretend their board members can read and cognitively process the information in advance. And, if they don’t believe their board members will do this, just start having the board meeting under this assumption and watch how they board members get their shit together and read the material in advance.

In this recent magical moment, rather than receiving anything via email, a Google Doc notification showed up in my inbox. I went to it and the entire board package was in a single Google doc file. The entire management team and the entire board was included on it. As I read through the Google doc, whenever I had a comment or a question, I highlighted the section in question, hit Command-Option-M, and left a comment. Then, as other people read through the package, they left comments. And then the management team responded to the comments.

Voila – an interactive board package. Zero special technology. It wasn’t planned, or assigned. It just naturally happened. When we showed up to the board meeting, everyone had the issues in their mind. We’d already cut out an hour of setup, and probably another hour of discussion. So we got right down to the higher level issues that the board material, and comments, and the responses generated.

In this case, the CEO created a very simple agenda immediately before the board meeting that captured the strategic issues we needed to address. There were a few tactical questions outstanding – they got knocked off quickly. We had a two hour board meeting – 90 minutes of it was intense and fruitful. No one referred to any paper – we looked each other in the eyes for 90 minutes and had a deep, engaged, substantive discussion.

I’ve been describing this as a part of a “continuous board engagement” – similar to “continuous deployment and continuous innovation” in Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. I get information daily from most of the companies I’m involved in. I’m in the flow of a lot of information – some “noise” but a huge amount of “signal.” Then – the week before the board meeting, the current state of things gets consolidated into a dynamic document that allows everyone involved to interact with each other around the content.

I’m going to play a lot with this in the next few months. Any suggested tweaks or changes to this approach? Any obvious pitfalls?