Every board looks good on paper. Impressive resumes, recognisable names, the right mix of former CEOs and industry veterans. And yet, plenty of these boards still underperform quietly for years before anyone notices. So what actually separates a high-performing board from one that simply looks the part? This is a question I get asked constantly, usually by promoters building their first formal board, or by CXOs trying to understand what they’re walking into when they take a b

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If you sit on a board, advise one, or are hoping to sit on one someday, you’ve probably heard some version of this sentence lately: “There’s a new corporate governance bill, and it’s going to change how boards operate.” True. But most of what’s floating around is either too legal to be useful or too vague to act on. So let’s fix that. This piece walks through what the corporate governance bill amendments actually say, why they exist, and — more importantly — what they mean fo

Executive Summary The IndusInd Bank whistleblower allegations are not really a story about a rogue trade or one bad quarter. They are a story about timing. A bank knew, or had very good reason to know, that something was wrong with its books long before it told anyone. By the time it spoke up, the damage was done and a regulator had to push it into the open. Now, in mid-2026, a fresh whistleblower complaint has landed with the Prime Minister's Office and four regulators, alle

Here's something that doesn't get said often enough in corporate governance circles: the proxy season is no longer a quiet, procedural ritual that the legal team handles in the background while the rest of the company gets on with actual business. It hasn't been that for a while now. But in 2026, the stakes feel different. The room feels different. Shareholders are showing up with sharper questions, better data, and in some cases, a genuine appetite to make noise. Activist in

Introduction: The New Reality of Board Diversity Something significant is happening in boardrooms across the world. Over the past decade, board diversity and inclusion has moved from being a governance aspiration to a strategic necessity. Companies have made measurable progress in bringing more women, professionals from varied backgrounds, and diverse experiences into their boardrooms. However, recent years have also witnessed a growing debate around DEI initiatives. A global

Picture this. You're a shareholder of a listed company. The person who runs the business day to day — sets the strategy, manages the team, controls what information flows to the board — is also the person chairing the very board that is supposed to hold them accountable. Who, exactly, is watching whom? That is the heart of the CEO duality corporate governance debate. It's been running for decades. Not because the governance logic is unclear — it isn't — but because the answer

Let me tell you something that most DEI conversations get wrong from the very first sentence. They frame DEI in leadership as something a company does for its people. A goodwill gesture. An HR initiative. Something you announce in a press release and then measure once a year in an employee satisfaction survey. That framing is the problem. Diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace are not something you do for people. It is something you build with people — and when you

Here's something that doesn't get said enough. When people talk about India AI leadership, they picture a large talent pool, cost advantages, and English-speaking engineers. That picture isn't wrong — it's just incomplete. What's actually happening is something more deliberate. India isn't just building AI. It's building AI within a framework of responsibility, enterprise pragmatism, and governance that most nations are still struggling to put together. That combination — spe

A Boardroom Scene That Didn't Exist Three Years Ago Picture a boardroom in Dubai, late 2025. Six directors. Coffee. The agenda used to be three pages. Now it's eleven. Somewhere on page seven, between "Q3 Marketing Spend" and "New Hires," there's a line item nobody loves: Transfer Pricing Documentation Review. Three years ago, this conversation didn't happen here. UAE businesses didn't think about corporate tax because there wasn't any. You ran your numbers, you paid your VAT

The Quiet Revolution Nobody's Talking About Walk into any UAE family business office that's been around since the 1970s, and you'll see something strange happening. Old photographs of the founder still hang on the walls. The majlis is still where the real conversations happen. But there's also a board meeting calendar pinned to the door. A family constitution sitting on someone's desk. A legal advisor on speed dial. Something has shifted. And it didn't shift slowly. The UAE f

So They Actually Did It I'll be honest. When I first read that the UAE was making an AI system a Cabinet advisor, I assumed something got lost in translation. That happens a lot with regional news. You read it once, think "that can't be right," then check the original Arabic source. But no. It's exactly what it sounds like. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid said it on the record in June 2025. From January 2026, the UAE's National AI System would sit as an advisory member of the Cabi

I Don't Think Most UAE Boards Know What Just Happened Here's the honest truth. I've been watching UAE corporate governance for years, and 2025 was unlike anything I've seen. Five major federal laws. One regulator replaced. ESG turned from voluntary to mandatory. Director liability widened. The Chairman-CEO rule, the one everyone thought was sacred, got rewritten. All of this in roughly 18 months. And yet, when I talk to people on UAE boards, half of them don't know about half

ESG Just Stopped Being a Marketing Story For about a decade, ESG in the UAE meant the same thing in most boardrooms. A glossy annual report. A few photos of solar panels. A community engagement page. Maybe a paragraph from the Chairman about sustainability values. The Marketing department wrote it. The board signed it. Everyone moved on. That era ended on 30 May 2025. That's when Federal Decree-Law No. 11 of 2024, the UAE Climate Law, came into force. Full compliance is due 3

Most UAE Boards Think They've Made the Shift. They Haven't. I'll be upfront. Every consultancy in Dubai is selling the same line right now. "Governance has moved from compliance to strategy." It's in every pitch deck, every conference panel, every LinkedIn post by a Big Four partner. And honestly, most of it is rubbish. Here's what I actually see when I sit in UAE boardrooms. Most companies are still doing compliance. They've just dressed it up in strategy language. They have

There was a time, not so long ago, when sitting on a corporate board was something you accepted as a quiet honour. A retirement crown. A few meetings a year, a sitting fee, a polite dinner, and a line on the LinkedIn page that read "Independent Director, ABC Limited." That world is gone. In 2026, board compensation is no longer a prestige conversation. It is a governance risk conversation. And the people running that conversation are not the directors themselves — they are th

Let me paint a quick scene. It is a Tuesday morning in March. The annual general meeting of a Nifty 50 company is two weeks away. The board has spent six months on a thoughtful, intentional decision to delay CEO succession by a year — because the company is mid-way through a major acquisition and continuity matters. They have explained the reasoning in earnings calls, investor letters, and the proxy statement. Somewhere in a server in New York, an AI system ingests that proxy

Here is a quiet number that has been making the rounds in CFO conversations for the last six months. Ninety-five percent. That is the share of corporate generative AI pilots that have not produced a measurable impact on profit and loss, according to a July 2025 report from MIT's NANDA initiative called The GenAI Divide. Between thirty and forty billion dollars has been spent on enterprise AI. Five percent of those pilots are extracting millions in real value. The other ninety

Here is a strange little scene that is playing out inside boardrooms across the world right now. A board chair turns to the CEO and asks, very politely, who owns the AI strategy. The CEO smiles, nods, and says the right thing. The board feels reassured. The CEO walks back to their office, calls a meeting, and asks the same question to their own team. Four different executives raise their hands. One of them is the CIO. One is HR. One is the head of a business unit. One is sitt

Let me start with a question most boards have not yet asked themselves out loud. If an AI agent in your company places an order, signs off a refund, files a customs entry, or sends a quote to a client at 3 AM on a Sunday — and gets it wrong — who exactly is accountable on Monday morning? If you paused for a second there, you are not alone. That pause is the whole problem with agentic AI governance right now. Boards across India, the US, and Europe are sitting on a quiet shift