Archive for April 2010
At the Financial Literacy & Education Summit 2010 that occurred on Monday, April 19th, Jennifer Kuperman, Head of Global Corporate Responsibility for Visa said: “Last September, Visa announced at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting that we would build on our initial commitment in 2008 and redouble our efforts to reach 20 million people with financial literacy worldwide by May 1, 2013. Today, I am pleased to announce that we are significantly exceeding our progress toward this goal and have already reached 10 million people with Visa’s financial literacy program.
A major component of our program is Financial Football — or Financial Soccer, as we call it here in the U.S. (Financial Soccer, an on-line game that teaches financial literacy, blogger’s note.) With FIFA World Cup fever building, we thought this was the perfect time to use Visa’s sponsorship of the world’s most popular sport to harness the passion for soccer and turn it toward financial literacy.
So far, Visa has translated the Financial Soccer educational video game in 10 different languages and disseminated it widely — at no cost — in many countries.”
The Summit, in its fourth year, is a collaboration between Visa and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The Summit’s purpose is to raise the awareness of the need for better financial literacy education and therefore create more financially literate citizens.
Many business owners and CEOs of small to mid-size companies and nonprofits spend a lot of time working in their business as well as on it. This is especially true for those who downsized due to the recession.
For those who have had their noses to the grindstone you can lose perspective as to where your company fits into the economic picture, your industry and the global market place. Fortunately, you can turn to your advisory board to provide the perspective you may be missing. Of course this will only be true if you were thoughtful and deliberate on how you selected your advisors.
The types of questions to ask your advisors if you feel you’ve lost perspective:
- What purchasing trends are you seeing in customers now that the recovery has begun?
- What are the borrowing trends for businesses our size?
- Where are companies accessing capital if traditional channels are still closed?
- What opportunities have we overlooked that we need to explore?
- What did we try in the past unsuccessfully that might now work in the new world order since the recession?
What other questions would you add to the list?
Need more information on how to set-up your advisory board? The Advisory Board Kit: A Comprehensive Guide to Establishing an Advisory Board is now available.
I consult with CEOs who want to form advisory boards and nonprofit executive directors looking to improve their organization’s board. Based on my experience here are ten tips for forming or optimizing a board:
- Be clear on the vision of your organization.
- Be clear on the organizational strengths & weaknesses.
- Develop a profile of the type of advisor/director needed from the information in #1 & 2.
- Use the profile to inform contacts of what you are looking for.
- Don’t recruit friends and family. Let me repeat, don’t recruit friends & family…it’s a recipe for disaster on multiple levels!
- Implement the recommendations of the board.
- Keep the advisors informed between meetings.
- Orient the advisors when they first start and educate the advisors as your business changes.
- Don’t always look to another CEO to be the one to join your board. Often times the next layer down is equally as qualified and may even have more time to devote.
- Understand why someone would want to serve on your board.
These points are just as applicable to private and public company boards. What else would you recommend?
