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16 Gibraltar International www.gibraltarinternational.comBusiness%u201cMany years ago in a boardroom far far away%u2026%u201dOnce Upon A Time it was wonderful to be a non executive director. All it required was a healthy appetite, a love of fine wines and a decent golf handicap. You would start by attending a dinner the night before the board meeting. It would be long and liquid. However you could sleep through much of the meeting the next day, until the time had come for you to nip off to the golf course with your fellow directors. As you wandered around the course you would compliment each other on what a good job you had done in running the company. That was Once Upon A Time.Non Executive Directors (NEDs)Today such sinecures, if they did indeed exist, are extinct. The extinction, like that of the dinosaur was swift and brutal. Many of those with low handicaps at golf suddenly had significant handicaps in retaining and gaining new directorships. The failures of NEDs to properly monitor the Executive, to control the psychopath who was the Chief Executive (and there were a number) and generally act as a critical friend to the organisation as a whole, has meant that many have become museum pieces. Today%u2019s NEDs must be fleet of foot and nimble of brain.The Non Executive Director%u2019s brought this upon themselves as failures such as Enron WorldCom and the Royal Bank of Scotland, together with a multitude of other ones which caused damage not merely to the businesses themselves but to national on international By Marcus Killick OBE, CEO, ISOLAS LLP & Fiduciary GroupContinued p18