No. of Recommendations: 16
Now it's possible that it doesn't matter at all who is on the board, but a reasonable argument can be made that since 50% of the population is women, and that women buy lots of stuff, perhaps they should have a voice in the rooms where what gets sold and how those companies operate gets decided. That seems pretty fair to me, and while that 16% figure is a lot lower than 50%, I can see that might be an artifact of the lower participation in the workforce for women through the 80's and 90's.
I don't think the function of a company's board is to accurately represent the target market of its customers. I'm not even sure it is good for there to be a lot of diversity on the board, whether it is male/female, racial, age, nationality, sexual orientation, etc. You want to have directors on the board who are competent, honest, hard-working and who are prepared to challenge the performance of the company's employees, most notably the CEO, but to the extent that the board has such people, I don't care if they are all black or white, or whether they are all American or Japanese, or all over 60, and I particularly don't care whether they are men or women and what their sexual preferences are.
Berkshire has done a good job of outlining the kind of people they want (business-oriented, skin in the game) and I would be more upset if they started packing the board with obvious diversity picks than if they ended up with a bunch of geriatric white males that have big ownership stakes and think independently about the business. And I have no fear that they would ignore a suitable candidate who happens to be black or female or same-sex orientation. In other words, I am very happy with the Berkshire board and I wish more companies were like Berkshire, as politically incorrect and non-diverse as it may be. And if we need to have 'a voice in the room' about what gets sold, to teenagers for instance, that room doesn't have to be the boardroom, and there doesn't need to be a teenager on the board. Focus groups and talking to managers and market testing are for that, but please leave the business decisions to businesspeople.
dtb
