Most boards meet four times a year. The dangerous ones meet twelve.
A Rs. 180 Cr company asked me to look at why their board felt exhausting.
The board had met 11 times in the previous financial year. The promoter was proud of it. He saw it as discipline. Engaged directors. A board that took its job seriously.
I read the minutes of all 11.
Nine of them were operational. Pricing of a product line. A vendor dispute. Whether to lease or buy a second warehouse. A hiring decision two levels below the CXO line.
These are not board questions. They are management questions that had walked into the board room and sat down.
The two meetings that were genuinely strategic, the ones about capital allocation and a possible acquisition, were rushed. Both ran short. The acquisition discussion got 25 minutes because the warehouse debate the same morning had taken 90.
Here is what I have come to believe after watching this pattern repeat.
A board that meets often is usually not a strong board. It is usually a board that has not been allowed to be one.
When a promoter cannot let go of operations, the operating decisions follow him into the board room, because that is where he now spends his attention. The board meeting becomes a longer management meeting with better chairs. Frequency goes up. Governance goes down. The two move in opposite directions and everyone mistakes the motion for health.
The fix was not fewer meetings. It was a defined reserved-matters list and an operating delegation that the promoter signed and then, harder, actually followed.
Within a year the board met five times. Each meeting was shorter and the acquisition that mattered got a full session of its own.
A board is not measured by how often it meets. It is measured by what only it decides.
Have you sat on a board that met too often for the wrong reasons? What finally changed it?
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