the.com/boardroom
Where decisions made by people you'll never meet quietly rewrite your whole life.
means The room where a company's board of directors meets to make major decisions, typically dominated by a long table and high-stakes conversation.
from A plain compound of 'board' and 'room.' The key word is 'board,' which in the sense of a governing council comes from the same humble source as the board you eat off — Old English 'bord,' a plank or table. A 'board of directors' originally meant the people gathered around the table, much as 'room and board' still means lodging plus the table you're fed at. So the boardroom is, quite literally, the room with the important table.
- origin
- Named for the board games of corporate strategy
- power radius
- One vote here can erase thousands of jobs
- table shape
- Often oval so nobody sits at the head
- avg age
- Boardrooms skew gray and overwhelmingly male
- hidden cost
- Long mahogany tables average tens of thousands
apple board meetings — steve jobs and later tim cook led decisions affecting 2 trillion dollar company valuations
enron boardroom — houston energy company where executives approved fraudulent accounting that collapsed in 2001