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The Boardroom Daily Brief is a daily business podcast for executives, board members, and leadership-minded professionals who want fast, strategic insights. Hosted by Ash Wendt, each episode delivers breaking business news, leadership strategy, governance insights, and talent development advice—without the fluff. Whether you're a CEO, investor, or rising leader, you'll get clear, actionable intelligence to navigate boardroom decisions, stay ahead of market trends, and lead with confidence.
Powell's playing coy with the calendar while the real action's happening in the dirt. Literally, the US government might buy 10% of a lithium mine. OpenAI and Oracle just announced five more AI cities. And Micron's earnings proved that memory chips are the new bottleneck everyone forgot about. Today, we're talking about building speed into your governance before the market forces it on you.
Freeman:The boardroom daily brief delivers strategic intelligence for executives who need clarity fast. Cut through the noise, get to the decisions that matter, and understand the implications before your competitors.
Ash:Welcome to the boardroom daily brief. I'm Ash Wendt delivering daily intel for executive minds. Thanks to today's sponsors, Cohen Partners Executive Search, The Boardroom Pulse, and execsuccession.com. Today is Wednesday, 09/24/2025. Let's decode what matters.
Freeman:Powell gave Wall Street exactly nothing to work with, and that's precisely the message.
Ash:After cutting rates to four to four and a quarter last week, Powell showed up yesterday with deliberate ambiguity. No timeline or commitments. Just careful words about balancing inflation against employment while noting that valuations look stretched. The market response was predictable. Dollar strengthened, stocks churned, yet traders still price in a 91% chance of another cut in October even with Powell's warning about stretched valuations.
Ash:Here's what this means for your planning. Build two equally detailed scenarios. One where rates drop another quarter point by October, making marginal projects viable, but acquisitions expensive. One where Powell pauses, keeping financing costs elevated, but potentially correcting asset prices. The companies that win won't guess right.
Ash:They'll execute either path without scrambling because discovering you only planned for one outcome during an earnings call is career suicide.
Freeman:The lithium story is bigger than lithium. It's about supply chains becoming weapons.
Ash:Reuters broke news that should change how you think about procurement. The US government is considering a 10% equity stake in Lithium America's Thacker Pass mine, plus restructuring 2,000,000,000 in loans. The stock went vertical, but this isn't about one mine. It's about critical minerals becoming national security assets. When governments take equity stakes in commodity producers, the rules fundamentally change.
Ash:Today, it's lithium. Tomorrow, it could be rare earths, specialized semiconductors, anything deemed critical. If your supply chain touches any critical mineral, your procurement strategy just graduated from operational to existential. Lock in your off take agreements now while it's still a commercial conversation. Build price protection before national security trumps market mechanics.
Freeman:Project Stargate just revealed what AI infrastructure actually means.
Ash:OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced five new AI data centers across Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and the Midwest. Total investment approaching 500,000,000,000, power consumption in gigawatts. But this isn't about data centers. It's about computational geography. These facilities are placed where power, cooling, and sovereignty intersect.
Ash:Texas has deregulated power. The Midwest has Great Lakes cooling. New Mexico has isolation for sensitive workloads. Once you've locked up the power contracts and water rights, that geography is yours for a decade. If your AI strategy assumes you'll rent capacity when needed at prices you can afford, where you need it, time for new assumptions.
Ash:The good spots aren't just taken, they're gone.
Freeman:Micron's earnings contained a warning disguised as good news.
Ash:Beat expectations, raised guidance, stock jumped, but buried in the earnings call. Their high bandwidth memory is sold out through 2026. Not tight, sold out. This is the bottleneck nobody saw coming. You can substitute GPUs.
Ash:You can't substitute memory bandwidth. It's physics. If your AI model needs certain bandwidth and that memory doesn't exist, your model doesn't run. Audit every initiative for memory requirements, not just compute, talk to suppliers about memory allocation, not just chips, redesign where possible to use less memory intensive approaches because you can't ship features that require memory that doesn't exist.
Freeman:China's semiconductor stance is hardening into permanent reality.
Ash:Chinese companies want NVIDIA chips. Chinese regulators want sovereignty. This tension isn't resolving. It's crystallizing into parallel tracks. You need two AI strategies now.
Ash:Version control by geography, models trained on different data, inference on different hardware. It's not ideal, but ideal isn't available anymore. Build everything for parallel tracks, create switching mechanisms for changing regulations, maintain relationships on both sides because picking too early might mean picking wrong. That's the news. Now let's fix the thing that's probably killing your company's ability to compete.
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Freeman:Today's deep dive, governance that actually governs, building committees that make decisions, not just have meetings.
Ash:A board member recently told me something that stuck. We spend 80% of our governance time on 20% of our decisions. The important calls get made in hallways while committees debate typography. That's the organizational disease I see everywhere. Companies create committees to feel safer about big decisions, but those committees become the exact reason decisions never happen.
Ash:More people in the room doesn't mean better judgment. It usually means no judgment at all. Today, I'm going to show you how to build governance that produces decisions at the speed of opportunity, not the speed of consensus. This isn't about having fewer meetings, it's about designing the few meetings you have to actually produce outcomes. Let's start with a fundamental question.
Ash:When do you actually need a committee? Most committees exist because someone, somewhere, got burned by a bad decision and decided never again. So they created a committee to spread the blame. Then another bad decision happened, so they added more people to the committee. Now you have 15 person committees that meet weekly to discuss reversible decisions that should take five minutes.
Ash:Here's the rule. Committees should only exist for irreversible decisions with material risk. What qualifies? Locking in a five year supplier contract that represents 20% of your costs, killing a product line that generates revenue today for an uncertain tomorrow, Entering a new geography that requires infrastructure investment. Making a technology choice that locks you into an architecture for the next decade.
Ash:These are one way doors. Once you walk through walking back is expensive or impossible, these deserve committee governance. Everything else should belong to a single human, not a department, not a working group, a person with a name, a budget ceiling, and clear boundaries, because reversible decisions should be fast. If you can undo it, if the risk is contained, if the timeline is urgent, committees aren't governance, they're organizational scar tissue. When you do need a committee, size determines success.
Ash:Five people maximum, not five plus observers, not five core members and 10 stakeholders, five humans who can fit around a small table, look each other in the eye, and make a decision before the coffee gets cold. Who are these five? Let me be specific. First, the leader who owns the outcome. This isn't a representative.
Ash:This is the person whose bonus, reputation, and possibly job depends on this decision working. They have to live with the consequences, so they get a vote. Second, the CFO or senior finance lead who owns the math, not someone who can explain the model, someone who built it, who understands its assumptions, who can tell you which variables matter and which are noise. They're not there to say no, they're there to price the risk. Third, legal or policy counsel who owns the boundaries.
Ash:They know what's possible, what's problematic, and what's prohibitive. But here's the key. They need to be solution oriented. Their job isn't to list everything that could go wrong. It's to design structures that let you move fast without stepping on landmines.
Ash:Fourth, the platform or product lead who actually has to build or operate the decision. This is the reality check. They know what's possible with current resources, what would require hiring, and what would require miracles. Without them, you're making promises the organization can't keep. Fifth, one smart skeptic with no stake in the outcome.
Ash:This is your devil's advocate. Someone senior enough to challenge anyone in the room, independent enough to not care about political consequences, and sharp enough to spot the flaws everyone else is too invested to see. That's it. Five people. Everyone else can read the summary.
Ash:Now let's talk about what goes into the committee and what comes out. Ban PowerPoint. I'm completely serious. No presentations allowed. No 60 slide decks with appendices.
Ash:Absolutely no. Let me walk you through my thinking theater. Instead, require a one page written brief. Writing forces clarity in a way that slides never will. Here's the exact format that works.
Ash:Two sentences of context, what changed and why this matters now, three genuine options with real trade offs, not two throwaway alternatives in your pet project, A clear recommendation with logic that would convince a skeptical stranger. One measurable success metric with a specific date when you'll know if you were right. The three most likely failure modes and what you'll watch for, and a specific trigger that would cause you to reverse course. If someone can't fit their decision request on one page, they haven't thought it through. The constraint isn't arbitrary, it's clarifying.
Ash:It forces people to distinguish between what matters and what's just noise. Here's the critical part most companies miss. Give the committee actual power. Most committees are advisory. They collect opinions, write recommendations, and pass them up to someone else who decides later.
Ash:That's not governance. That's expensive theater. Your committee needs three specific powers that matter. First, the power to approve or reject in the room. Not we'll consider this, not let's table this for next week, not we need more information.
Ash:Yes or no, decided before anyone leaves. If the committee can't decide with the information available, the answer is no. You can always come back with better information, but indecision isn't an option. Second, the power to kill zombie projects to fund new ones. This is where governance gets real.
Ash:If the committee sees a better use of resources, but all the money is tied up in projects that are technically alive, but practically dead, they need the authority to pull the plug. No separate approval process. No political negotiations. If they can't reallocate resources from failing bets to promising ones, they're not governing, they're just observing. Third, the power to modify their own process.
Ash:If the one page brief isn't working, they can change it. If five people is too many or too few, they can adjust. If weekly is too frequent or too slow, they can shift the cadence. Governance that can't evolve is governance that dies. Measure your committee like you'd measure any other critical function.
Ash:Two metrics matter above all else. Cycle time. How many days from when a brief is submitted to when a decision is communicated, not when it's discussed, not when it's directionally approved, when the yes or no is final and communicated. Hit rate. What percentage of approved initiatives meet their stated success metric by their stated date?
Ash:Publish both numbers monthly where everyone can see them. If cycle time exceeds two weeks, something's broken. Either the briefs aren't clear enough, the committee isn't empowered enough, or the decisions are too complex, fix it. If hit rate drops below 70%, your judgment engine needs tuning. Either you're approving things you shouldn't, your success metrics aren't realistic, or execution is failing.
Ash:Figure out which and fix it. Connect governance to your natural operating rhythm. Governance can't be a special event. It needs to integrate with how work actually flows through your organization. Monday becomes your capital day.
Ash:Capital allocation decisions happen here. Money moves or it doesn't. Projects get funded or they don't. Resources shift or they don't. One hour, five decisions maximum.
Ash:Wednesday becomes your operational day. Product decisions, supplier commitments, market entries, the irreversible operational choices that can't wait for perfect information. One hour, same room, same people. Friday becomes your risk day. What changed in the world this week that affects our bets?
Ash:New regulations, competitive moves, technology shifts, market signals. This isn't about making new decisions. It's about checking whether previous decisions still make sense. This creates a heartbeat. Regular, predictable, and reliable.
Ash:Everyone knows when decisions happen. Nobody wonders when they'll get an answer. Here's your path to implementing faster governance. This week, map every committee in your company. I guarantee you'll find at least 10.
Ash:Keep one. Kill the rest. For the one you keep, publish its exact charter in one paragraph. Name the five members. Document their decision authority.
Ash:Make it visible to everyone. Next week, run three real decisions through your new committee. Not test cases, real decisions with real consequences. Time everything from brief submission to final answer. Document what was decided and when you'll know if it worked.
Ash:At the end of week two, publish your first metrics. Cycle time for those three decisions. Your target hit rate. Make it boring, visible, and non negotiable. Within a month, you'll see the change.
Ash:Sales will stop complaining about waiting for approval because approval happens every week. Engineering will stop building the wrong things because decisions are clear and documented. Finance will stop chasing phantom budgets because resource allocation is transparent. The compound effect is powerful. When markets shift, you adapt in days, not quarters.
Ash:When opportunities emerge, you capture them while competitors are still forming committees to study them. When bets fail, and some will, you kill them before they become organizational zombies that everyone knows are dead but nobody wants to bury. Most importantly, your best people spend time building instead of meeting. Because the only thing worse than making a wrong decision quickly is making no decision while markets move around you. The uncomfortable truth nobody wants to admit, most companies would literally be faster if they flipped coins instead of holding meetings.
Ash:At least coins don't need calendar coordination, pre reads, or follow-up sessions. If you need operators who've built fast governance in real companies, not consultants with frameworks, but executives with scar tissue, Cowen Partners can identify leaders who've actually done this work. People who've killed zombie projects, made irreversible calls, and lived with the consequences. Build governance that governs. Measure speed like survival depends on it, because increasingly it does.
Ash:That's it for the boardroom daily brief. I'm Ash Wendt, delivering daily intel for executive minds. Get in, get briefed, get results.