Nomination Committee

Boards have these. Congress has this. The country club has this. For important positions, there needs to be…filtration. Like…when politicians want to put somebody in an important role in the President’s Cabinet, or the Supreme Court, or a committee within Congress (like Ways and Means), they have a nomination committee who filters out the riff-raff and idiots and thieves and sexual predators and ethically bankrupt individuals...so that we never get people like that in or around our political arenas.

Blink, blink. Yes, we’re now staring at you blankly after the above sentence.

Ok, so they don’t always work.

But nomination committees apply to corporate boards as well. The committee of 3 or 4 or 5 likely former finance people get together to nominate someone to the most important chair: the audit committee. The person who runs the AC signs off on the financial reports, and it’s their a$$ if the numbers are wrong. The members on the committee all speak the same accountant-ish language. They all know the holes to look for. They all know the way questions should be answered for the right person to be invited to sit on the board.

This process ends up being efficient for everyone, more or less. Lots of people who are sharp on, say, fair compensation for executives, won’t really have the foggiest about how nominations should work for audit. Same deal for the overall governance of a company. Boards usually pick their successors, and the NomGov Committee people perform that filtration function through a nominations committee as well.

Seem like a lot of bureaucracy for little reward? Well, it is. But maybe not surprisingly, corporate boards function vastly better than does Congress. Maybe we need to change the old ways, like what’s-his-name sings in A Star is Born.