The Boardroom Path

What changes when a seasoned executive joins a board and must influence decisions without executive authority? In this episode of The Boardroom Path, host Ralph Grayson speaks with Quintin Price, Chair of Oxford University Endowment Management and formerly of BlackRock, about what makes a non-executive director useful once they reach the table. Quintin draws on board roles at a listed investment trust, a grant-making charity, a US start-up and a university endowment. He explains why the board exists to represent the owners, why a chair should speak last, and why the chair can change the player but should never run onto the pitch. On 12 October, the FCA published a review finding that effective governance relies on constructive challenge and clear decision-making, according to Norton Rose Fulbright's summary. Provision 29 of the UK Corporate Governance Code now asks listed boards to show the basis for their view on material controls, as Board Intelligence explains. Quintin's model is a board that works like a choir, with different voices and shared operating principles. His advice to aspiring NEDs is to be at peace with who they are and find the board that needs their voice. (00:00) - Welcome to The Boardroom Path (03:29) - A Career Built on Learning (05:10) - How an Analyst Learned to Read Boards (08:28) - Agency Theory and Whom the Board Serves (11:15) - Standing on Principle (12:36) - Purpose, Profit and the Licence to Operate (17:31) - ESG and When to Take a Position (23:09) - Judgement and the Board as a Choir (28:02) - Why the Chair Should Speak Last (31:53) - The Chair, the CEO and the Football Pitch (38:44) - Choosing the Right Boards (47:12) - Credibility, References and Being Yourself Quintin Price: Quintin Price is Chair of Oxford University Endowment Management (OUem), where the board announced Caroline Serdarevic as its next Chief Executive in October 2026. He is Senior Independent Director of F&C Investment Trust, which he joined in March 2020, a trustee of the Leverhulme Trust, and a non-executive director of Aperture Investors in New York. He also sits on the investment committee of the Royal Shakespeare Company. From 2005 to 2015 he was at BlackRock as Global Head of Alpha Strategies and a member of the Global Executive Committee, and he later served as Global Head of Asset Management at Deutsche Bank. Earlier roles include Global Co-Chief Investment Officer at Gartmore and Global Head of Research at Putnam Investments and James Capel. His career across equity research, investment management and boards with very different owners gives him a practical view of how purpose and ownership shape good governance. Ralph Grayson: Ralph Grayson is a Partner in the Board Practice at Sainty Hird & Partners, bringing extensive experience in board-level recruitment, assessment, and advisory services. With a deep understanding of the corporate governance landscape, Ralph specialises in guiding senior executives as they transition into impactful boardroom careers. His thoughtful approach, combined with a passion for developing effective leaders, enables him to facilitate insightful conversations that equip aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors with the tools they need to succeed. Through The Boardroom Path, Ralph leverages his extensive professional network and expertise to empower listeners on their journey into the boardroom. Episode Insights: The board exists to represent the owners of the business, and personal agendas, egos and social factors can pull it away from that mission. A good chair draws out every director's view and summarises it before adding their own, rather than steering the discussion from the start. Independence of mind works when directors share core operating principles, which lets them be hard on the issues and soft on the people. Purpose and profit can reinforce each other, but a company that gives away too much of its return risks losing its licence to operate. Executive success earns a seat at the table, yet NEDs must stay off the pitch and influence executives through questions rather than instructions. Action Points: Speak last as chair: Go round the table and ask each director by name whether they have anything to add. Summarise what you have heard before offering your own perspective. If someone has already made your point, say you agree and move on. Test the fit before you accept: Ask what the board needs, how it operates and whether its culture matches your own principles. Do not take the first role offered simply to gain board experience. Talk to people who have served on boards, since they can help you spot a poor fit early. Ask rather than tell: When advising executives, frame your input as questions such as "Have you thought about this?" A Socratic approach is less threatening, so executives are more likely to listen. When they get something right, tell them, because leading as a CEO can be lonely. Check your record of challenge: Provision 29 of the UK Corporate Governance Code applies to financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2026 and asks listed boards to declare whether their material controls worked, as Board Intelligence sets out. Ask whether your minutes record the questions directors asked and the answers they received. That record is the evidence of how the board reached its view. Learn from poor appointments: If a board role does not work out, ask what you missed and why. Consider honestly whether ego, vanity or naivety shaped your decision to join. Use the answers to set clearer criteria for your next appointment. The Boardroom Path is the essential podcast for aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) navigating the journey from executive leadership to the boardroom. Hosted by Ralph Grayson, partner at Sainty Hird & Partners, each episode offers insightful conversations with industry leaders, seasoned board directors, and governance experts. Our guests share practical strategies, valuable perspectives, and actionable advice on how to effectively transition into board roles, maximise your impact, and build a rewarding NED career. Subscribe now, and take your first confident step along The Boardroom Path. Learn more about Sainty Hird & Partners at saintyhird.com. The Boardroom Path is produced by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford, UK.

How do you judge a leader's contribution when the most important results may not arrive for another four years? In this episode of The Boardroom Path, host Ralph Grayson speaks with Andrew Strauss, former England cricket captain, former Director of England Cricket and executive chairman of Mindflick, about what the boardroom can take from elite sport. They look at why alignment between chair and CEO matters more than any planning document, how England's impressive 2015 World Cup plan failed on the pitch, and how a board decides when to lean in and when to stay out of the executive team's way. The timing is pointed. Polling by NEDonBoard found that 80% of board members report dysfunction on at least one of the boards they sit on, with chair behaviour the most cited cause, while Board Intelligence research shows only 33% of directors see their board as essential to value creation. Andrew explains how Mindflick's profiling work surfaces what his team calls the empty chair, the perspective a board is least likely to take, and why pressure makes that blind spot worse. (00:00) - Welcome to The Boardroom Path (03:43) - From Middlesex Captain at 24 to England (06:33) - Leading by Example and Where You Add Value (08:07) - Captain and Coach, Chair and CEO: Alignment at the Top (09:47) - When a Great Plan Meets Poor Execution (12:15) - Embracing Chaos within a Framework (13:13) - Noses In, Fingers Out: The Board's Real Job (15:17) - Part-Time Coaches, Part-Time Boards and Complexity (18:25) - Why Mindflick Was Founded (24:33) - Inside the Profiling Tool and the Empty Chair (28:33) - Measuring How a Team Is Actually Performing (31:38) - Board Evaluations and a Strengths-Based Approach Andrew Strauss: Andrew Strauss is executive chairman of Mindflick, the performance psychology business he co-founded in 2013 with Dr Mark Bawden and Dr Pete Lindsay, and he now leads the company's expansion across Asia-Pacific from its new Hong Kong office. As a player he captained England in all formats, won two Ashes series and took the Test side to number one in the world rankings. He then served as Director of England Cricket from 2015 to 2018, where he rebuilt the men's one-day set-up and put in place the performance plan behind the 2019 World Cup win. Mindflick's Spotlight tool, built on reinforcement sensitivity theory, has now delivered more than 80,000 profiles and accredited over 1,200 practitioners, with clients spanning financial services, insurance and technology alongside Manchester United, England Cricket and England Rugby. Andrew is also executive chairman of TTB Sport Capital and founder of the Ruth Strauss Foundation.Ralph Grayson: Ralph Grayson is a Partner in the Board Practice at Sainty Hird & Partners, bringing extensive experience in board-level recruitment, assessment, and advisory services. With a deep understanding of the corporate governance landscape, Ralph specialises in guiding senior executives as they transition into impactful boardroom careers. His thoughtful approach, combined with a passion for developing effective leaders, enables him to facilitate insightful conversations that equip aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors with the tools they need to succeed. Through The Boardroom Path, Ralph leverages his extensive professional network and expertise to empower listeners on their journey into the boardroom. Episode Insights: Alignment between chair and CEO, like captain and coach, is the precondition for everything else; without it the board breeds factions and people start protecting their own position rather than the organisation's. A board's role is context-dependent, not fixed. Sometimes it needs to dial its involvement up, sometimes right down, and the useful question is what this moment demands rather than what the calendar says. Boards often lean into the areas they find interesting rather than the areas where they hold real expertise, which is how they end up stepping on the executive team's feet. Under pressure, people default to their own preferences and become less adaptable, so a board is at its least diverse in thinking exactly when diversity of thinking matters most. Internal board evaluations frequently amount to marking your own homework, which is why measuring how the team is functioning day to day, not just the output, gives a chair something more honest to work with. Action Points: Test the chair and CEO alignment first: Before looking at board composition or process, establish whether the chair and CEO genuinely see the business the same way. Misalignment at the top creates insecurity that spreads quickly through the board and the executive team. Treat it as a recruitment and appointment question, not something to patch up later. Shorten the planning horizon: Replace a fixed multi-year plan with a clear statement of intent plus regular checkpoints. Ask management what has changed in the market since the strategy was written and whether the plan still reflects it. Keep the framework and let the detail adapt. Name the board's empty chair: Work out which perspective your board is least likely to take, whether that is commercial, operational, customer or contrarian. Ask explicitly whose view is missing before a significant decision. Assign someone to argue that position when nobody naturally holds it. Watch where the board leans in: Audit the agenda for areas the board enjoys rather than areas where it adds value. Compare the time spent on each topic with the expertise actually in the room. Where interest outruns competence, hand the detail back to the executive team. Measure how the board works, not just what it delivers: Add a measure of board functioning alongside the usual performance reporting, and repeat it on a consistent basis. Treat a facilitated or data-led view as a counterweight to self-assessment. Use the gap between the two as the agenda for development. The Boardroom Path is the essential podcast for aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) navigating the journey from executive leadership to the boardroom. Hosted by Ralph Grayson, partner at Sainty Hird & Partners, each episode offers insightful conversations with industry leaders, seasoned board directors, and governance experts. Our guests share practical strategies, valuable perspectives, and actionable advice on how to effectively transition into board roles, maximise your impact, and build a rewarding NED career. Subscribe now, and take your first confident step along The Boardroom Path. Learn more about Sainty Hird & Partners at saintyhird.com. The Boardroom Path is produced by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford, UK.

What happens when a board's reputation comes under attack before anyone knows what actually happened? In this episode of The Boardroom Path, host Ralph Grayson speaks with Tim Robinson, partner at Schillings and a former British Army Major General, about why reputational resilience is a governance discipline rather than a communications exercise. They examine how data breaches, leaked documents, extortion and coordinated smear campaigns move across social and traditional media in minutes, and why boards that place reputation near the top of the risk register often do little practical preparation. Tim argues that the most important commodity in any crisis is facts, and that boards should rehearse scenarios, appoint a small empowered task team and prepare rebuttals for the stories they can anticipate. The argument is timely: the BBC reported in September 2026 on a deepfake victim calling for reputational abuse to be recognised as a distinct form of harm BBC News, while research published this year found deepfake fraud operating at industrial scale The Guardian. From privacy exposure audits for new NEDs to the first hour of a crisis, this conversation offers a practical roadmap for directors who want to be ready before the pressure arrives. (00:00) - Welcome to The Boardroom Path (02:33) - How People Behave Under Pressure (04:41) - Leadership Lessons Across Army and Boardroom (07:22) - Inside Schillings and High-Stakes Advice (08:57) - Reputation as Governance, Not Communications (10:21) - Who Owns Reputational Risk in the Boardroom (12:30) - Privacy Exposure Audits for New Directors (15:25) - Managing Your Digital Footprint Early (18:40) - When Reputational Threats Reach Board Level (20:17) - Out-Facting the Other Side with Facts (22:31) - Building Preparedness and the Task Team (26:52) - Simulating the First Hour of a Crisis Tim Robinson: Tim Robinson CBE is a partner at Schillings, the multidisciplinary consultancy that advises boards, companies and individuals on high-stakes situations affecting their reputation, privacy and security. A former Major General in the British Army, he joined Schillings in 2016 as its first non-lawyer partner since the firm converted to an LLP. He is an experienced negotiator who leads internal inquiries, settles disputes, runs counter-extortion operations and handles smear campaigns, and he features in the Spear's Best Reputation Managers Index and the Citywealth Leaders List.Ralph Grayson: Ralph Grayson is a Partner in the Board Practice at Sainty Hird & Partners, bringing extensive experience in board-level recruitment, assessment, and advisory services. With a deep understanding of the corporate governance landscape, Ralph specialises in guiding senior executives as they transition into impactful boardroom careers. His thoughtful approach, combined with a passion for developing effective leaders, enables him to facilitate insightful conversations that equip aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors with the tools they need to succeed. Through The Boardroom Path, Ralph leverages his extensive professional network and expertise to empower listeners on their journey into the boardroom. Episode Insights: Reputational resilience is a governance discipline, not a communications issue, and no single discipline can prepare for or solve a reputation problem alone. Boards list reputational risk near the top of the register but often invest more in cyber or fire safety, because no inspector will close them down over it. A privacy exposure audit for a high-profile new director is a duty of care, because if controversy comes, an aerial shot of the house follows. Routine pressures such as media inquiries and unhappy employees are more likely to cause a crisis than rare coordinated smear campaigns. Facts win the day: writing down the worst story a respected paper could print, and preparing the rebuttal evidence, is the core of preparedness. Action Points: Write the worst-case story now: Ask your task team to draft the story a respected publication such as the Financial Times could write about your business. Include every negative allegation that could appear. Then prepare a rebuttal fact and the supporting evidence for each claim, so you are never responding from a standing start. Appoint and empower a small crisis task team: Delegate crisis handling to a small group, such as the CEO, the senior in-house lawyer and the communications lead, reporting directly to the board. Keep the model simple and repeatable rather than building complex flow diagrams. Give the team the authority to employ external advisers when needed. Rehearse the crisis, not just the register: Put reputational scenarios on the board agenda as live simulations rather than coloured rows on a risk register. Rehearse with the task team so everyone knows their role and decision thresholds. Treat the exercise as preparation, not compliance. Commission a privacy exposure audit for new appointments: For any high-profile arrival, simulate what an investigative journalist could find from public sources. Present the findings privately to the individual and pay for it as a board. Let them decide how to reduce their own exposure. Brief employees early as well as outsiders: Treat internal and external communications as equally important in a crisis. Ask employees not to amplify speculation in the early days, because sharing screenshots raises the profile of the story. Use internal messages to reassure, even before the full picture is known. The Boardroom Path is the essential podcast for aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) navigating the journey from executive leadership to the boardroom. Hosted by Ralph Grayson, partner at Sainty Hird & Partners, each episode offers insightful conversations with industry leaders, seasoned board directors, and governance experts. Our guests share practical strategies, valuable perspectives, and actionable advice on how to effectively transition into board roles, maximise your impact, and build a rewarding NED career. Subscribe now, and take your first confident step along The Boardroom Path. Learn more about Sainty Hird & Partners at saintyhird.com. The Boardroom Path is produced by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford, UK.

How long should a good board member stay in the room? In this episode of The Boardroom Path, host Ralph Grayson speaks with Professor Alex Hill, Professor of Operations Management at Kingston Business School and co-founder of the Centre for High Performance, about what keeps organisations successful across generations rather than quarters. The timing matters. Russell Reynolds Associates recorded 234 chief executive departures globally in 2025, a 16% rise on the year before, with the average tenure of outgoing CEOs falling to 7.1 years, according to its Global CEO Turnover Index. Alex's own study of 440 school leaders found that the ones who built lasting improvement, the architects, almost lost their jobs at the end of year two, while the cost cutters he calls surgeons collected the accolades and moved on. The conversation covers the stable core and disruptive edge of enduring institutions, why about a quarter of a board should hold a decade of organisational memory but few should stay beyond fifteen years, and the one hard number Alex trusts as a predictor of long-term success. (00:00) - Welcome to The Boardroom Path (03:24) - Why Some Organisations Last for Generations (07:18) - From Olympic Medals to Sustainable Systems (12:15) - Research That Comes from Practice (16:09) - High Performance as Steam (17:42) - Pressure, Blue Thinking and Scenario Planning (20:43) - Learning from Ballet, Cage Fighters and Marines (22:30) - What the Board's Role Really Is (27:00) - A Stable Core and a Disruptive Edge (33:21) - Board Tenure and Collective Wisdom (36:30) - Oaks, Teenagers and Room for New Growth (42:16) - Architect Leaders, Surgeons and the Vitality Index Alex Hill: Professor Alex Hill is Professor of Operations Management at Kingston Business School and co-founder and Director of the Centre for High Performance, a research collaboration between senior faculty at Kingston University, Duke Corporate Education, London Business School and Green Templeton College, Oxford. He began his career in engineering, spending ten years across divisions of the Smiths Group and managing factories and larger parts of the business before moving into research and teaching. Over more than twenty years he has studied high-performing organisations across elite sport, education, the arts, healthcare, technology, financial services and the military, including Olympic teams, British Cycling, the New Zealand All Blacks, NASA, Eton College and the Royal Marines. He is the author of Centennials, drawn from a thirteen-year study of institutions that have stayed relevant for more than a century, and a Harvard Business Review contributor whose research on architect leaders challenged the appeal of the heroic turnaround chief executive. Thinkers50 has named him one of the thirty management thinkers most likely to shape how organisations are managed and led.Ralph Grayson: Ralph Grayson is a Partner in the Board Practice at Sainty Hird & Partners, bringing extensive experience in board-level recruitment, assessment, and advisory services. With a deep understanding of the corporate governance landscape, Ralph specialises in guiding senior executives as they transition into impactful boardroom careers. His thoughtful approach, combined with a passion for developing effective leaders, enables him to facilitate insightful conversations that equip aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors with the tools they need to succeed. Through The Boardroom Path, Ralph leverages his extensive professional network and expertise to empower listeners on their journey into the boardroom. Episode Insights: High performance is high stress, because getting it right and getting it wrong both have consequences, and that pressure exposes how individuals and teams really behave. Enduring organisations hold a stable core of purpose and stewardship alongside a disruptive edge of people who challenge, provoke and push for change. Collective experience of the organisation itself is one of the better predictors of long-term success, which argues for staggered board tenure rather than fixed uniform terms. Architect leaders rebuild for the long term and usually face a confidence crisis in year two, while surgeons cut costs, take the credit and leave the organisation weaker. The vitality index, the share of sales from products developed in the last two years, gives boards a hard number for whether the business will still be relevant in future. Action Points: Map the tenure profile of your board: Plot when each director joined and when each is due to leave. Look for clusters where most of the organisational memory arrives or departs together, since that is where future risk sits. Aim for overlapping terms so knowledge is handed over rather than lost in one go. Run your own vitality index: Ask management what share of this year's revenue comes from products, services or clients started in the last two years. Set the target from how fast your market moves, from a third for slow-moving sectors to nearly all of it for fast ones. Track it beside profit so cost cutting cannot disguise a stalled business. Decide what you are hiring a chief executive to do: Agree at the outset whether this is a turnaround or a long-term rebuild, because the two need different people and different timeframes. Write down what good looks like in years one and two for a rebuild. That record protects an architect from being judged on a surgeon's scorecard. Rehearse the pressure before it arrives: Put realistic scenarios in front of the executive team and work through each eventuality. The purpose is to keep people thinking clearly when the moment comes rather than reacting. Treat the rehearsal as preparation for a performance, not a compliance exercise. Balance challenge and support consciously: Look at how challenge and support are split across the chair, the board and the executive team. One person rarely carries both well, which is why strong chief executives tend to work in a pair. Decide which the organisation needs most in its current situation, and be explicit about who provides it. The Boardroom Path is the essential podcast for aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) navigating the journey from executive leadership to the boardroom. Hosted by Ralph Grayson, partner at Sainty Hird & Partners, each episode offers insightful conversations with industry leaders, seasoned board directors, and governance experts. Our guests share practical strategies, valuable perspectives, and actionable advice on how to effectively transition into board roles, maximise your impact, and build a rewarding NED career. Subscribe now, and take your first confident step along The Boardroom Path. Learn more about Sainty Hird & Partners at saintyhird.com. The Boardroom Path is produced by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford, UK.

What does leadership look like when nobody in the room can simply give an order? In this episode of The Boardroom Path, host Ralph Grayson speaks with Lieutenant Colonel Dean Canham OBE, former head of the Centre for Army Leadership, about leading in a setting where authority is collective and the chair has limited unilateral power. Dean sets out the Army's definition of leadership as character, knowledge and action that inspires others to succeed, and explains why he treats leadership as a capability to be trained rather than a by-product of rank. The conversation lands at a useful moment. Research from the Corporate Governance Institute, based on 500 directors and C-suite leaders across the UK and Ireland, points to a widening gap between boardroom confidence and board readiness, while the Institute of Directors' NEDs Reimagined report argues that boards must move from periodic oversight to active stewardship. Dean makes the case for followership as the biggest gap in most organisations, explains why he thinks about the room before a difficult conversation, and offers a shortcut for time-poor boards: lead by example. (00:00) - Welcome to The Boardroom Path (03:31) - From Infantry Command to the Centre for Army Leadership (08:17) - Professionalising Leadership as a Capability (11:05) - Gareth Southgate and Leadership Outside the Military (16:02) - Character, Knowledge, and Action (20:34) - Followership, the Missing Capability (23:47) - Ten-Minute Habits That Build Better Leaders (27:23) - Reading the Room and the Relational View (33:40) - Collective Leadership at Board Level (41:11) - Noses In, Fingers Out (45:36) - Leading in Crisis and War Gaming the Board (51:23) - A Leadership Framework for Boards Dean Canham: Lieutenant Colonel Dean Canham OBE is a serving British Army officer, now working in the Ministry of Defence, and the former head of the Centre for Army Leadership at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Commissioned into the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, he has deployed to Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Estonia and the Falkland Islands, led his battalion's contingent at the 2012 Olympic Games, and commanded the 1 Mercian Battle Group between 2020 and 2023. He was appointed OBE in 2018 for his work on security sector reform in Somalia and South Sudan while at the Permanent Joint Headquarters and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. At the Centre for Army Leadership he led the 2024 Leader Competency Framework and wrote the 2025 paper Leading on Leadership, which argues that leadership remains rooted in human interaction but must evolve with its social and operating environment. He is a fellow of the Institute of Leadership and serves on the advisory council of the Coalition for Global Prosperity.Ralph Grayson: Ralph Grayson is a Partner in the Board Practice at Sainty Hird & Partners, bringing extensive experience in board-level recruitment, assessment, and advisory services. With a deep understanding of the corporate governance landscape, Ralph specialises in guiding senior executives as they transition into impactful boardroom careers. His thoughtful approach, combined with a passion for developing effective leaders, enables him to facilitate insightful conversations that equip aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors with the tools they need to succeed. Through The Boardroom Path, Ralph leverages his extensive professional network and expertise to empower listeners on their journey into the boardroom. Episode Insights: Leadership and management are separate capabilities. Things are managed and people are led, so development aimed at process will not improve how people are led. Followership is the larger gap in most organisations. Training the majority to act as if they own the business reduces how much depends on the few at the top. Boardroom leadership uses the same skills as command, applied differently. Directors switch between self, team and organisational levels inside a single meeting. Leadership is relational as well as situational. Two people in the same meeting can read the same intervention differently, based on trust and shared history. Balance a board on character before skills. If the table is full of directive personalities, the next appointment probably needs to be collaborative. Action Points: Map the character around your table: Write one or two dominant character traits next to each seat on your board, then note how each person behaves under pressure. Compare that pattern with the decisions the board finds hardest to reach. Use the gaps to shape the next recruitment brief, ahead of sector experience. Train followership, not only leadership: Most development budgets go to the few people at the top, which leaves the majority untrained. Ask your head of talent what the organisation teaches people about proactivity, integrity and speaking up without formal authority. Fund that work and track retention rather than course completions. Be intentional before every room: Take 30 seconds before each meeting to ask what the people in it need from you for the next ten minutes. Change the setting when the conversation calls for it, as Dean does by walking rather than sitting across a desk. Small choices about tone and place shift what people are willing to say. Rehearse the decisions, not the process: Board war games usually test the mechanics, which most organisations already handle well. Build scenarios around values and integrity failures instead, because that is where big organisations come unstuck. Run them often enough that difficult judgement starts to feel familiar. Check what happened further down: After a significant board decision, ask someone several levels below the board what changed for them. If nobody on the board knows, there is a gap in the chain and you need to find where it sits. Put a standing item on the agenda to close that loop. The Boardroom Path is the essential podcast for aspiring and newly appointed Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) navigating the journey from executive leadership to the boardroom. Hosted by Ralph Grayson, partner at Sainty Hird & Partners, each episode offers insightful conversations with industry leaders, seasoned board directors, and governance experts. Our guests share practical strategies, valuable perspectives, and actionable advice on how to effectively transition into board roles, maximise your impact, and build a rewarding NED career. Subscribe now, and take your first confident step along The Boardroom Path. Learn more about Sainty Hird & Partners at saintyhird.com. The Boardroom Path is produced by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford, UK.