My contribution to a board
Any board now overseeing a consumer company is also overseeing a large body of data about people, usually without a director who has built or governed it. I would bring that experience from the operating side. I have designed consent journeys and lived with their revenue consequences, built churn and recommendation models and argued about what they should optimise, sold anonymised location data and decided where it had to stop, and sat on the board of an audience measurement company whose figures move advertising money across a national market. I can read a model's evaluation, ask which population it was tested on and recognise when a reported figure rests on an assumption nobody has written down.
I would also bring a habit that matters more than technical knowledge: asking who is harmed by a number before asking whether it is good. In my experience the risks that reach a board late are the ones that looked like growth: subscribers who stopped using a product but kept paying, consent rates that depended on a hidden button, a data product whose smallest counts identified people. Those are governance questions before they are technical ones, and a committee can test them without becoming expert.
I would be candid about what I would not bring. I am not an accountant and would not offer myself as an audit committee's financial expert. I have not been a chief executive or run a P&L larger than DKK 31 million. I would expect to learn the company's economics from its finance director and auditors, and to contribute most where data, customer trust and regulation meet.
My first year on a board
I would treat the first year as an apprenticeship with a defined end. Before my first meeting I would ask the company secretary for two years of board and committee papers, the current risk register, internal audit's reports on data and IT, any correspondence with data protection authorities and the complaints analysis that management itself uses. I would ask to spend a day each with the finance director, the head of customer operations and whoever owns the largest customer database, and an hour alone with the external auditor.
Through the year I would keep a short written list of the questions I still could not answer about how the company uses customer data, and bring it to the chair at six and at twelve months; I would want it to grow shorter. I would not ask to chair any committee in that year. If the board had no technology or data committee, I would not lobby for one before testing whether the existing committees already cover the ground. At the end of the year I would ask the chair for direct feedback and accept the board evaluation's view of whether my contribution justified the seat.
Conflicts and their management
Three relationships would shape any seat I accept. The first is my employment. Vesterlund comes first, and I would not join the board of any news publisher, broadcaster, streaming service or advertising technology company, any major advertiser in Danish newspapers, or any supplier of data or measurement services to Vesterlund. The second is Nordmål, whose board I sit on as a shareholder's nominee, so I would decline any company that sells or buys audience measurement in Denmark. The third is the Vesterlund Foundation, which holds investments beyond our group; before accepting a seat I would ask the foundation's secretariat to confirm that it has no holding in, or grant relationship with, the company concerned.
If a conflict arose after appointment, for example because the company began advertising heavily in our titles or approached Vesterlund about a data partnership, I would tell the chair in writing that week, leave the room for the relevant items and offer to stand down if the relationship looked lasting. The more ordinary conflict is time. Our own board meets eight times a year and our results fall in February and August, so I would fix dates twelve months ahead and keep twenty-four days genuinely free, preparation included.
My independence statement
I am employed full time by Vesterlund Mediegruppe and paid a salary and bonus by it; I hold no shares in it, because a foundation owns it outright. My one current directorship, at Nordmål, is a nominated seat, and I would not describe myself as independent there. For any board I join, I would list every relationship between that company and Vesterlund, Nordmål, the Vesterlund Foundation and me, including advertising purchases, data contracts and family ties, and leave that board to decide, under the governance recommendations that apply to it, whether I may be counted as independent.
Judgement in practice
01Voting for a method that cut my own employer's reach
In 2023 Nordmål's methodology committee recommended replacing browser-based reach figures with estimates of people, drawn from a recruited panel combined with site logs. For most publishers, Vesterlund included, reported reach would fall by roughly a third. Our commercial director asked me to argue for a two-year transition in which both figures would be published. Before the board vote I told the Nordmål chair that my employer had a commercial interest in delay and that I had been asked to argue for it. I then voted for a twelve-month transition, because two figures published for two years would have let every seller quote the larger one. The board approved the twelve-month plan, and my commercial director was unhappy with me for some months. The practice I would take to another board is to say aloud whose interest I have been asked to represent before speaking to the merits.
02A breach notified although the first legal view said it might not be needed
In February 2024 a misconfigured export to a newsletter vendor left the email addresses and subscription types of about 2,300 subscribers visible to the vendor's support staff for eleven days. Our counsel's first view was that the risk to readers was low and that notifying Datatilsynet might not be required. The GDPR requires a controller to notify its supervisory authority within seventy-two hours of becoming aware of a breach, unless the breach is unlikely to result in a risk to people's rights and freedoms. I recommended to the chief executive, and then to the Audit and Risk Committee chair, that we notify both the authority and the readers affected, because a subscription type can reveal a reader's interests and because the vendor's staff were outside our control. We notified within sixty hours, and the authority closed the matter with guidance on vendor controls. As a director I would want marginal calls like this brought to a committee chair early, not settled quietly.
03Asking a board to own an algorithm's rules
At Fjellvang in 2018 the streaming team expected the reserved editorial share to be approved as a product setting by the director of digital services. I asked instead for the board to adopt it as policy and to receive a report on it each year with the public-service accounts. Some colleagues thought this invited the board into operational detail. My reasoning was that a rule deciding which programmes most viewers see first was an editorial and public-service decision, and that a future management team under pressure on viewing figures should have to ask the board before changing it. The board adopted it. When a later product review proposed shrinking the reserved share, the proposal had to bring evidence to the board, and it was withdrawn. On any board I would ask which rules embedded in software are really policy, and who is entitled to change them.
Committee contribution
Chair and member readiness| Capacity | Committees |
|---|
| Ready to chair | A technology and data committee, where a board has established one, after a year as a member |
|---|
| Ready to join | Risk committee · Audit committee, as a member without the accounting or auditing qualification that one member must hold · Technology and data committee |
|---|
Board and committee exposure
Presented to the Board or a committee
Vesterlund Mediegruppe A/S
Board of directors: data strategy, consent design, subscriber reporting and the recommendation policy
March 2021–present
Presents quarterly to the full board, including its three employee-elected members; not a director and holds no vote.
Reported to a committee
Vesterlund Mediegruppe A/S
Audit and Risk Committee: data protection compliance, personal data breaches and data-related risks
September 2021–present
Reports twice a year alongside the data protection officer, who also reports to the committee independently of me.
Served as a director
Nordmål ApS
Board of the joint-industry audience measurement company
June 2022–present
Non-executive director nominated by Vesterlund as one of the shareholders; not independent of the shareholder group.
Member of a committee
Nordmål ApS
Methodology committee
June 2022–present
One of four members of the committee that recommended moving from browser counts to estimates of people in 2023.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Fjellvang Kringkasting
Board: recommendation policy and its annual public-service report
March 2018–December 2020
Presented the reserved editorial share for adoption as policy and reported on it each year.
Capacity and preferences
- Time available
- 24 days per year
- Current directorships
- 1
- Sectors
- Consumer subscription services · Insurance and pensions with large retail customer bases · Energy retail with smart-meter data · Public transport operators with travel-card data · Cooperative retail with loyalty programmes
- Company type
- Nordic listed mid-cap, or foundation- or cooperatively owned company, that holds substantial consumer data and has no commercial relationship with Vesterlund or Nordmål
- Company stage
- An established company whose use of customer data has grown faster than its board's oversight of it, often after a digital launch, a merger of customer systems or a regulator's attention
The seat I am pursuing
I am looking for one non-executive seat at a Nordic company outside news publishing whose customers trust it with a great deal of personal data: a consumer subscription business, an insurer or pension company with a large retail base, an energy retailer working with smart-meter data, a public transport operator holding travel-card records, or a cooperative retailer with a loyalty programme. Revenue between roughly DKK 2 billion and DKK 20 billion would suit the time I can give.
I would expect to join the risk committee or the audit committee as a member and, if the board has a technology and data committee, to chair it after a year if the board wished. I am not seeking a seat to represent a single interest, and I would not take a second directorship while I hold my executive role and the Nordmål seat. Above all I would want a board that wants its data questions asked plainly, including the ones that make a growth figure smaller.
Governance learning and readiness
IICA Independent Directors’ Databank: Not yet registered
India keeps the IICA Independent Directors' Databank for candidates to Indian boards. I live and work in Denmark, I am pursuing Nordic board seats, and I have not registered. It does not apply to the boards I am considering; I record a status only because this page follows a common format.
- Part-time board programme at Kalvebod Board School, completed in 2024, covering Danish company law, directors' duties and audit committee work
- Four years on the board of Nordmål ApS and on its methodology committee
- Quarterly board presentations at Vesterlund Mediegruppe since 2021 and twice-yearly reports to its Audit and Risk Committee
- Study of the Danish Recommendations on Corporate Governance and the recommendations on foundation governance with Vesterlund's company secretary