Celebs at the Board Meeting
from
September/October 2006
by Don Morrison
You know the feeling. At a particularly leaden moment during the chief executive’s budget presentation, your mind wanders, your legs grow numb, and your eyes seek livelier stimuli. If recently they happened to light on a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
, which directors have been known to smuggle into the boardroom for such contingencies, you may have noticed a front-page story with intriguing possibilities.…
Seems that real estate developers in major markets like Manhattan, Miami, and Las Vegas are coping with a glut of unsold condominiums by throwing lavish, celebrity-studded parties for brokers and potential buyers.
The Journal
lists the singer Wyclef Jean,
American Idol
host Ryan Seacrest,
X-Men
star Hugh Jackman, the multitalented Pamela Anderson, and assorted other A-list hunks and divas among those recruited to add glamour to the condo confabs. As you snap back from your boardroom reverie, you can be forgiven if, instead of that guy in the gray suit with the PowerPoint clicker and the nose hair, you see…Pamela Anderson.
And why not? Celebrities fill their nonperforming hours with parties, benefits, openings, premieres, receptions, and other events at which they can show off their eyelifts and wardrobes. Many of these forays are unpaid efforts to help fund nonprofit organizations or promote movies, music albums, or TV series. But the dirty little secret of the celebrity game is that stars can be rented. You can get Bill Cosby or Drew Carey for $50,000 a gig and up through a company called All-American Speakers. The Norman Phillips Organization has a whole roster of celebrities and, for tighter budgets, look-alikes.
Try it for your next board meeting. The benefits could be enormous. Absenteeism would probably vanish, along with wrinkled suits and various other grooming lapses. Who wouldn’t want to look his or her best if Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were at the table? And there’d be no more dozing at slow moments if Pamela Anderson or Jennifer Aniston were making eye contact with you.
CEOs should give this modest proposal extra consideration. How about hiring a celeb to deliver your own reports to the board? That should minimize those pesky follow-up questions. If there’s an especially delicate item on the agenda concerning which you’d benefit from inattention, you could have Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert poke fun at you while you were speaking (he sure upstaged George Bush at the White House correspondents’ dinner). Recruiting and retaining board talent would no longer be an issue if every member could leave the meeting to dazzle dinner parties with, “As I was telling Bruce Springsteen this afternoon…” You could even get away with lower directors’ fees. Heck, members would pay
you
for the chance to swap golf tips with Tiger Woods. And your company’s troubles would fall into proper perspective if just before your update on that unfortunate shareholder suit, you asked Madeleine Albright to brief the board on the perils facing the West in an age of global terrorism.
Do not sell your directors short. Given the centrality of reality shows to American culture, you could help keep the board in touch with customers while improving the directorial gene pool by holding a kind of director
Star Search/Survivor
competition, televised, of course. Include song sheets in your board packages and pit individual members against one another as they croon, spoon, and fashion a canoe out of a conference table. Losers would get voted off the island—no questions asked, no proxy materials required. When the winners signed their inevitable record and book deals, you could demand a cut of the take for the corporate treasury. Or better yet, rent them out as celebrities to other boards.
Yes, not only should stars be invited to board meetings, but board members should also become stars. The perks are better, the hours are shorter, and the meetings are far more fun. They wouldn’t even be meetings anymore. They’d be parties.
