Law Commons^™

Board 3.0: An Introduction, Ronald J. Gilson, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay sketches out the case for a new model for public company boards: Board 3.0. The now-dominant public board model is an organizational experiment begun approximately 40 years ago, which replaced a prior organizational form that had fallen short. The current model, the “monitoring board,” is dominated by part-time independent directors who are dependent on company management for information and are otherwise heavily influenced by stock market prices as the measure of managerial performance. We have seen a recurrent pattern of monitoring boards composed of talented people that fail to effectively monitor. Nevertheless, when companies fall short in business …