My contribution to a board
I would bring a board practical knowledge of how selection, performance management and leadership appointments shape behaviour in a business whose frontline workforce is large, dispersed and partly outside the employment relationship. I have worked with agency forces ranging from 18,000 to 760,000 people, run HR for a provincial branch and for a joint venture, and prepared papers for board remuneration committees since 2016 and for a nomination committee since 2020. I know where a management paper about the workforce is likely to be incomplete: totals instead of cohorts, completion rates instead of samples, and succession lists without evidence that anyone named has done the job.
I would also bring experience of contraction, which many boards see only from the financial side. Songbai's agency fell by about 70% in six years. I can help a board distinguish a workforce that is shrinking because the business is failing from one that is shrinking because it was never sustainable, and ask what the company is telling the people who remain.
I am not an accountant and would not offer myself as an audit committee's financial expert, nor as a specialist in investment or risk modelling. Remuneration and nomination are where I can be useful. On a remuneration committee I would want one full cycle as a member before taking the chair, to learn the company's pay structures, its shareholders and its advisers. On a nomination committee my most useful contribution would be on regional leadership and succession, particularly where a company is opening in provinces where it has no managers of its own.
Judgement in practice
01Showing a president the cohort figures behind an agency plan
When our 2022 plan assumed 120,000 agent recruits, the easier course would have been to improve training and leave the recruitment model alone. Instead I showed the president a cohort analysis: 9% of new agents still selling at thirteen months, and 38% of their early business written on their own families. I attached the agency head's written objection to my proposal rather than summarising it. The president approved the change with quarterly reports to the board, and the board saw the cost, about RMB 1.1 billion of first-year premium against plan, well before it saw any benefit. On a board I would want the cohort behind every workforce total, and I would want management to know that a first year of worse-looking figures, honestly explained, will not be held against them.
02Taking falsified calls to a board committee before the remedy was settled
When internal audit found return-visit calls marked complete that had never taken place, I asked that the findings go to the board's consumer rights protection committee in the same quarter, before we had agreed a remedy. Some colleagues preferred to wait until we could present a solution with the problem. I argued that the committee should hear the problem in the form we had found it, including the fact that some supervisors had known. The committee asked for the customer remediation and the change to performance management to be reported separately, which made both clearer and kept the refunds from waiting on an HR debate. As a director I would rather receive an unfinished problem than a finished story, and I would tell management so at the outset.
03Recommending that a foundation decline a restricted gift
As chair of the scholarship committee at Qiaolin Vocational Education Foundation, I recommended in 2024 that we decline a gift from a training company that wanted its own courses to be the only ones our scholarship students could attend. The gift would have funded about 300 scholarships a year, and two directors argued that students would benefit regardless of the condition. My concern was that students from rural counties would be steered into one provider's courses whatever their fit, and that the foundation's choice of courses would no longer be its own. The board declined the condition, the company withdrew, and we raised a smaller unrestricted sum over the following year. The question I bring to decisions like that is what the organisation will still be bound by once the money has been spent.
My first year on a board
My first three months on a board would go mostly on papers and conversations. The committee papers of the past three years would tell me what the board has been asked to decide; shareholder letters and any regulatory correspondence on pay would tell me what others have questioned. I would meet the chair, each committee chair, the chief executive and the head of HR one at a time, and ask the last of them which workforce figures the board has never seen in cohort form. Before my second board meeting I would want to spend a day at an operating site outside the head-office city.
From the fourth month to the end of the year I would sit through one complete remuneration cycle, from objectives to year-end decisions and disclosure, and keep my proposals few. Unless I saw a conduct or disclosure issue that could not wait, I would bring questions rather than recommendations to that first cycle.
At the year's end I would ask the chair to tell me plainly whether my contributions had helped, and whether an insurance background had led me to see the company's workforce too much like an agency. A new sector teaches a first-year director more than he can teach it, and I would rather say so at the start.
Conflicts and their management
Songbai's board must approve any outside appointment I hold, and our compliance function would confirm whether rules on concurrent positions for senior managers of insurers are engaged. Some seats I would rule out from the start: any insurer, intermediary, bank or other financial institution; any company that sells insurance alongside its own products; and any company that buys from, sells to or is invested in by Songbai on a significant scale. My disclosures would include shares held through Songbai's employee plan, my directorship of Qiaolin Vocational Education Foundation, which receives an annual donation from Songbai, and any work done by remuneration advisers or search firms for both organisations.
Where a conflict appeared during a term, I would tell the chair before the relevant meeting, take no part in the item and check that the minutes said so. A director who has to leave the room repeatedly is not doing the job, and in that case I would stand down. Songbai's pay and agency data would stay with Songbai, however relevant they seemed to another board's question. The 25 days a year I have offered would be agreed with my employer in advance and would include preparation and a reserve for unplanned meetings.
My independence statement
My independence is for the appointing board to judge, not for me to declare. It would do so under the listing rules of its own market, Hong Kong or a mainland exchange, with full information: my employment at Songbai, the Songbai shares I hold through the employee plan, my foundation directorship and any commercial link between Songbai and the company, its shareholders or its management.
Committee contribution
Chair and member readiness| Capacity | Committees |
|---|
| Ready to chair | Remuneration committee, after one full annual cycle as a member · Scholarship or programme committee of a charitable foundation |
|---|
| Ready to join | Remuneration committee · Nomination committee · A board committee overseeing customer protection or sustainability at a company with a large frontline workforce |
|---|
Board and committee exposure
Served as a director
Qiaolin Vocational Education Foundation
Board of directors; chair of the scholarship committee from 2023
June 2021–present
Director of an Anhui-based foundation that funds vocational training for students from rural counties; chairs the committee that sets scholarship criteria and approves partner training providers.
Reported to a committee
Songbai Life Insurance Company Limited
Board remuneration committee
March 2020–present
Prepares papers on senior management pay, annual executive assessment, deferral and recovery, and specialist pay; present at each meeting until directors meet alone.
Reported to a committee
Songbai Life Insurance Company Limited
Board nomination committee
March 2020–present
Prepares senior management and provincial general manager succession papers, including the evidence behind each successor's readiness.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Songbai Life Insurance Company Limited
Full board
2021–2023
Presented the agency selection reform with quarterly cohort reports, and the six-year tenure limit for provincial general managers.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Songbai Life Insurance Company Limited
Board consumer rights protection committee
2021–2022
Presented the return-visit audit findings, the customer remediation and the removal of forced ranking for verification roles.
Reported to a committee
Brennmark Xinghe Life Insurance Company
Board remuneration committee of the joint venture
2016–2020
Principal author of the committee's papers, including the bonus deferral and recovery arrangements approved by both shareholders.
Capacity and preferences
- Time available
- 25 days per year
- Current directorships
- 1
- Sectors
- Private hospital and elderly-care groups · Vocational and continuing education providers · Consumer services and logistics companies with field or franchise workforces
- Company type
- A company listed in Hong Kong or on a mainland exchange outside financial services, or a large unlisted company preparing for a listing, with an established remuneration committee
- Company stage
- A company whose frontline workforce is changing shape, through contraction, a new service model or expansion into new provinces, so that selection, pay and conduct need board attention together
The seat I am pursuing
I am looking for one independent non-executive directorship at a company listed in Hong Kong or on a mainland exchange outside financial services, or at a large unlisted company preparing for a listing, whose frontline workforce numbers several thousand people. Private hospital and elderly-care groups, vocational and continuing education providers, and consumer-services or logistics companies with field or franchise workforces are where my experience would transfer most directly. I would like to serve on the remuneration and nomination committees and, after a full cycle, to chair the remuneration committee if the board wished. Three things would decide whether I pursued a conversation: the chair's own account of the gap I would fill, how the remuneration committee uses its advisers, and how the company treated its people during its last significant change. I would turn down a seat where the attraction was my employer's name or an insurance executive's contacts.
Governance learning and readiness
IICA Independent Directors’ Databank: Not yet registered
My status with the IICA Independent Directors' Databank is not-yet-registered, deliberately. The databank is kept for independent directors of Indian companies, and none of the seats I am considering, in Hong Kong or mainland China, involves it. I have no plans for an Indian directorship; my independence for a Chinese or Hong Kong company would be tested under that market's own listing rules.
- A programme for prospective independent non-executive directors of Hong Kong-listed companies, completed in 2025
- Annual briefings to Songbai's remuneration committee from its external adviser on executive pay practice, attended since 2020
- Foundation board service since 2021, including chair of the scholarship committee from 2023
- A 2024 course on how audit committees test management's accounts, taken to read financial statements as a non-specialist director