The Dutchman in the Room

Governance and leadership are not about titles or corner offices. After decades in boardrooms across three continents I know that the tone at the top is everything. Not as a platitude, but as a daily practice. In my experience it is preached more often than it is lived.

I have been fortunate to see leadership at its best. Shell’s head office was a masterclass in well-organised structures and processes. INSEAD and Harvard reinforced what I had observed in practice: that leadership is a craft, not a personality trait, and that the academic rigour behind it is worth taking seriously.

But the real tests came elsewhere. Restructuring UB Engineering while its holding company, Kingfisher Airlines, was in serious trouble was not a leadership textbook exercise — it was a question of keeping people focused and a business viable when the ground was shifting beneath everyone’s feet. And sometimes the challenge is cultural: being Dutch in certain environments means being open, direct, and honest in rooms that would prefer you weren’t.

As a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, I have always believed that good governance is the foundation everything else is built on. These posts reflect on what that looks like — in practice, under pressure, and across cultures.