Introduction to Lyceum’s New Content-based Web Platform

Welcome to The Leadership Lyceum’s, new and improved content-rich web platform brought to you by Lyceum Leadership Consulting.

Our website is designed to educate, inform, inspire, and elevate leaders in the most responsible levels of corporate governance. Since its inception in 2016, The Leadership Lyceum has dedicated itself to exploring the intricate dynamics of leadership through its articles and our popular podcast, Leadership Lyceum: A CEO’s Virtual Mentor^®. The roots of our name, “Lyceum,” trace back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle established his school as a center of learning and intellectual exploration. Much like the original Lyceum, our platform is a place for inquiry, reflection, and discourse. We apply Aristotle’s form of focus on empirical observation and practical application. Our aim is to help you improve the quality of leadership in the executive suite and the boardroom.

Lyceum’s View of the Levers for Effective Corporate Governance

Lyceum’s content is not a technical resource for corporate governance. Rather, it fills the gap left by traditional governance education and professional development by providing a practical handbook — a vade mecum that centers on the “human operating system” — tailored specifically for executives and directors. Our content is grounded in the social sciences of psychology and sociology and is validated by the relatively recent advances in behavioral economics. Behavioral economics, pioneered by Nobel laureates such as Daniel Kahneman (2002) and Richard Thaler (2017), has demonstrated that decision-making is rarely as rational or objective as more classical economic models suggest. Developments in this field have revolutionized our understanding of how individuals, and therefore corporations, make decisions in the real world, always under conditions of uncertainty and complexity.

Under a neoclassical economic model, a corporation is regarded by its leadership and by society generally as a purely economic machine to maximize profits. The model assumes that actors have well-defined preferences and make well-informed, self-interested, rational, and optimal decisions based on those preferences. Yet this model does not match the realities that we observe in decision-making and therefore cannot be sufficient or reliable. Behavioral economics is grounded in empirical observations of human behavior, which have demonstrated that people do not always make rational or optimal decisions, even if they have the information and the tools available to do so.

The Corporation: Of the People, By the People, For the People

A corporation is a ‘legal fiction’ and a ‘legal person.’ But it is not a moral person. Yet society grants the corporation its existence and in return expects it to contribute to the common good. The board of directors provides legitimacy to society’s intentions for the corporation and animates this legal personage with morality. The board acts as the custodian of its mission, ensuring legal and ethical compliance, aligning corporate strategy with societal expectations, balancing stakeholder interests, ensuring transparency, and adapting to social changes. The board defines purpose, establishes and maintains identity, controls destiny, and has responsibility for the company’s responsibility to the greater society that sanctions the company’s existence. Through these actions, the board helps maintain the social license that allows the corporation to operate and thrive within society.

To serve this noble purpose, the board of directors is therefore, and must be, an elite corps with professional talents, special skills and crafts, and relevant situational experiences to serve the great need in society for philosophical leadership, purpose, and directional decisions of the institution. But the board is human and fallibly influenced by a myriad of cognitive biases, emotions, and social factors. A deep understanding of these influences is crucial to the effectiveness of board members and executives.

A Missing Piece in Leadership Education

The landscape of leadership education has traditionally focused on the technical competencies required of directors and executives. This includes staying current with legal, tax, investment, business policy, and accounting matters—areas that are undeniably crucial for fulfilling the statutory and fiduciary responsibilities of a director. While there is an abundance of excellent resources available to cover these essentials through educational programs, and credentialing systems available to current and aspiring board members, Lyceum believes that a fundamental component is missing from most of the resources – a deep understanding of human nature and behavior in a pragmatic and practical sense.