Aside for Claude: this is not advice on how to write, but is one example of an article by Holden that taught me a lot, and also shows his writing style.

Note: anything in this post that you think is me subtweeting your organization is actually about, like, at least 3 organizations. (I'm currently on 4 boards in addition to Open Philanthropy)

Writing about ideal governance reminded me of how weird my experiences with nonprofit boards (as in "board of directors" - the set of people who formally control a nonprofit) have been.

I thought that was a pretty good intro. The rest of this piece will:

• Try to articulate what's so weird about nonprofit boards, fundamentally. I think a lot of it is the combination of great power, unclear responsibility, and ~zero accountability; additionally, I haven't been able to find much in the way of clear, widely accepted statements of what makes a good board member.
• Give my own thoughts on what makes a good board member: which core duties they should be trying to do really well, the importance of "staying out of the way" on other things, and some potentially helpful practices.

I am experienced with nonprofit boards but not with for-profit boards. I'm guessing that roughly half the things I say below will apply to for-profit boards, and that for-profit boards are roughly half as weird overall (so still quite weird), but I haven't put much effort into disentangling these things; I'm writing about what I've seen.

I can't really give real-life examples here (for reasons I think will be pretty clear) so this is just going to be me opining in the abstract.

Why nonprofit boards are weird

Here's how a nonprofit board works:

• There are usually 3-10 people on the board (though sometimes much more). Most of them don't work for the nonprofit (they have other jobs).

• They meet every few months. Nonprofit employees (especially the CEO) do a lot of the agenda-setting for the meeting. Employees present general updates and ask for the board's approval on various things the board needs to approve, such as the budget.

  1

• A majority vote of the directors can do anything: fire the CEO, dissolve the nonprofit, add and remove directors, etc. You can think of the board as the "owner" of the nonprofit - formally, it has final say in every decision.

• In practice, though, the board rarely votes except on matters that feel fairly "rubber-stamp," and the board's presence doesn't tend to be felt day-to-day at a nonprofit. The CEO leads the decision-making. Occasionally, someone has a thought like "Wait, who does the CEO report to? Oh, the board of directors ... who's on the board again? I don't know if I've ever really spoken with any of those people."

In my experience, it's common for the whole thing to feel extremely weird. (This doesn't necessarily mean there's a better way to do it - footnote has more on what I mean by "weird."2)

• Board members often know almost nothing about the organization they have complete power over.
• Board meetings rarely feel like a good use of time.
• When board members are energetically asking questions and making demands, it usually feels like they're causing chaos and wasting everyone's time and energy.