Building your Personal Board of Directors
And a PaperEMR
Hi Friends,
I spent my last day in London at the Conduit Club at an event on Building your Personal Board of Directors. I came out convinced that I needed to spend more time actively cultivating a mastermind group of super advisors.
Last year I left the company I founded in 2012 to work on new problems – and the Personal Board of Directors is a part of a larger inquiry I’m making into how to navigate big professional transitions.
“What do you do?” was a question I dreaded for a long time.
When you walk away from one career before the next professional move is perfectly lined up you open yourself up to the raw experience of redefining yourself. Peeling off one layer and making room for the next stage of growth.
Intentionally cultivating a network and paying attention to who influenced me has helped. Taking the first step towards a Personal BoD was easier than I thought— here’s a few tips on how to build yours.
When I learned about the idea of a Personal Board of Directors it gave me a framework to collect people that could help me figure out what I wanted to do next, and figure out how to do it. This essay runs through three reasons you need a Personal BoD and a dozen tips on how to start building yours.
Innovation Spotlight
I spent a long time catching up with my friend Pratap on my recent trip back to Kenya. Pratap has been working on digital innovations in healthcare in Kenya for over a decade, and has done some groundbreaking work on the catchy concept of Digital ≠ Paperless.
I did not buy it at first. Surely, digital health would leverage the booming smartphone industry and plummeting costs of data to connect people and communities with better information?
A decade into watching Pratap build Health-E-Net I’m impressed with the concept, traction and his persistence.
His business combines paper tools (e.g. checklists) for rural hospitals and clinics with computer vision to create digital health records for patients. Currently hospitals in Turkana, one of the most remote areas in Kenya, are able to view analytics on disease and patient trends and to better control quality and supply chain based on data. The Health-E-Net team is planning to expand throughout East Africa and expand new product lines, like app-free telemedicine.
How are you building your Personal Board of Directors? Comment to share your ideas :)
— Melissa