It may contribute to good corporate governance to condense a relevant set of qualifications into a single quality score that would appear alongside a candidate's name on the proxy vote sheet.
Now... I understand it is a gross oversimplification to sum up a person's quality with a single number - but it can be helpful in certain instances like this. After all, complex comparisons of NFL quarterbacks have benefited greatly from a similar development of the passer rating, a composite score based on: completion percentage, average yards per attempt, percentage of touchdown passes, and percentage of interceptions.
Perhaps such a Board Member Quality Index (BMQI) could be derived for publicly held companies based on a formula like the following:
BMQI =
25%*(number of years work experience in same or related industry/50)
+ 15%*(number of years all work experience/50)
+ 20%*(number of years on other boards/20)
+ 20%*(number of college degrees/3)
+ 20%*(percent of personal net worth invested in company)
- 25%*(number of indictments of questionable or criminal activity)
It would be nice to include some sort of metric to capture "X factors" or "confidence of one's peers" ... maybe averaging a 1-to-10 vote of confidence by existing Board Members. Anyways, it's a work in progress. Any other ideas for a BMQI calculation?...
Hypothetical example shown below:
IDEATION: July 22, 2010
Take a series of language samples. Independent of the business at hand the language the individual uses to express him/herself reveals underlying personality traits, beliefs, and assumptions. Even a basic structural analysis would reveal frequency of words used (me, I, not, can, will, etc). How to best analyze and apply the findings has yet to be determined.
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