My contribution to a board
More and more decisions that reach the boards of consumer companies are product decisions underneath: a new subscription structure, an app replacing a counter, a pricing or recommendation engine, a digital channel that becomes the main way customers reach the company. I have made decisions of that kind for fifteen years, after a decade as a radio journalist explaining other people's decisions to listeners. A board would get three things from me.
The first is a way of reading a proposal as the customer will meet it. When a paper says a change will simplify the journey, I ask to see the screen, the letter and the cancellation route, and I ask which customers will find it harder. The second is working knowledge of the European rules that now shape digital products, including platform transparency, accessibility, consent for advertising and consumer rights on subscriptions, at the depth a non-lawyer director needs to ask good questions rather than to give opinions. The third is experience of older customers moving to digital service, from linking newspaper subscribers in their eighties to online accounts in 2014 to building Mode lecture at Lisandre a decade later.
I would not bring the financial expertise an audit committee needs, deep knowledge of network or IT infrastructure, or experience of a turnaround. I have never sat on the board of a listed company, and I would expect to spend my first year learning how such a board works before trying to change anything about it.
Judgement in practice
01Writing the dissent against a limit customers were not meant to notice
In autumn 2022 our executive committee considered applying a dormant fair-use clause quietly to our heaviest listeners. The proposal was competent and would have protected margin within a quarter. I wrote a page setting out why I thought it would fail: the people it affected were precisely those most likely to notice, and once noticed it would define us. I proposed visible hour-based plans instead and estimated, in the same paper, how many subscribers we would lose. Our chair, Henri Delastre, later asked to see the dissent before the board approved the change. The loss came in close to my estimate. As a director I would ask the same question of any proposal whose success depends on customers not reading something, and I would want management to feel able to bring me its own dissents.
02Leaving a negotiation when my next employer was across the table
In November 2020 I was leading Merovia Mobile's side of a bundle negotiation with Lisandre Audio when Lisandre's chief executive asked whether I would consider joining her company. I told Merovia's chief commercial officer, Griet Hoorebeke, the same afternoon, handed the file to a colleague and took no further part in the terms. I joined Lisandre five months later. When the Merovia bundle came up for renewal at Lisandre in 2023, I asked not to take part in that either, and our general counsel recorded it. Conflicts of this kind are rarely dramatic. They are small, early and easy to ignore, and the time to act on one is before anyone else has noticed it.
03Turning down a grant that would have chosen our books for us
In 2022 a large publisher offered Les Voix Partagées €90,000 on condition that our volunteers record its catalogue ahead of other titles. The money would have covered almost a year of studio costs, and several directors wanted to accept. I argued that the condition would let a funder decide what blind readers could hear, when our volunteers had always chosen books with those readers. I proposed going back to the publisher with an offer to record a share of its titles alongside our own choices. The board agreed, and the publisher gave €60,000 without the condition. On any board I would look for the clause in a generous offer that quietly changes who is making the decisions.
My first year on a board
I would start as a customer. Before my first meeting I would sign up for the company's main product, call its support line with a real question and follow its cancellation route to the end. Where the board receives complaint summaries, I would read the last year of them. Directors who have used the product ask different questions from directors who have only read about it.
For six months I would mainly listen and ask. I would meet the chief executive, the chair of each committee I joined, the head of customer service and whoever owns the company's digital products. I would ask each of them the same thing: which customer-facing decision did the board approve most recently, and how was it judged afterwards? Then I would read the minutes of that decision and compare the two accounts.
In the second half of the year I would propose at most one change. It would probably be that customer-facing changes reach the board with a page showing what customers will actually see and which of them it may disadvantage. If the board already has such a page, I would say so and propose nothing. At the year's end I would ask the chair plainly whether my product questions had helped the board or distracted it, and adjust accordingly.
Conflicts and their management
While I work at Lisandre, three groups of companies are closed to me: competitors in audiobooks, e-books, podcasts and audio streaming; the roughly 1,300 publishers and rights holders that license their catalogues to us; and the two mobile operators that sell our service in bundles, one of which, Merovia Mobile, employed me until 2021. I would also decline advertising sales houses that sell podcast inventory.
No seat is possible without written consent from Lisandre's chief executive and our board chair under our policy on external mandates, and I would ask our general counsel to check the company's suppliers and customers for overlaps before I accepted. I hold Lisandre shares and unvested performance shares, which I would declare. Les Voix Partagées receives about a fifth of its budget from Lisandre's corporate giving, which I would also declare.
If a conflict arose during a mandate, I would raise it with the chair before the meeting rather than at it, leave that item and ask for the minutes to record my absence. Lisandre's subscriber data, prices and plans would stay out of every other boardroom, including on the occasions when they would be useful. If I found myself stepping out of recurring business, I would conclude that I held the wrong seat and resign it.
My independence statement
Whether I am independent is a judgement for the board, made against the governance code the company follows; in France that is usually the AFEP-MEDEF code or, for smaller listed companies, the Middlenext code. My part is to give the board everything it needs for that judgement: my employment at Lisandre and my shares and unvested performance shares there, my unpaid seat at Les Voix Partagées, my employment at Merovia Mobile until March 2021 and any business between Lisandre and the company. I would tell the chair promptly if any of those facts changed.
Board and committee exposure
Served as a director
Les Voix Partagées
Board of directors; leads the digital and accessibility working group
April 2019–present
Unpaid director of a Lyon association whose 340 volunteers record books for blind and partially sighted readers; joined budget and grant decisions in each annual cycle since 2019.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Lisandre Audio SA
Full board
2021–present
Presents the annual product strategy; presented the hour-based plans in December 2022 and the free podcast tier business case in 2024.
Reported to a committee
Lisandre Audio SA
Audit and risk committee
2023–present
Reports twice a year on the register of regulatory obligations affecting the product, covering platform rules, accessibility, advertising consent and subscription cancellation.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Lisandre Audio SA
CSR committee
2024–present
Presents quarterly measures on our charter with independent publishers and an annual accessibility report.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Merovia Mobile
Customer and commercial committee of the board
2018–2020
Presented the self-service programme and the results of the cheaper-tariff pilot, which the committee asked management to make permanent.