【正文】 s no longer sufficient, suggested several panel members. Directors should also be engaged in pany strategy, talent development and risk management. It is a matter of not only feeding the beast providing investors with expected quarterly returns but also building the business advising executives on strategic direction and appropriate risk. To that end, directors should bring not just oversight capabilities to the boardroom. They should also be ready to challenge management practices, exercise independent judgment and resist when executive actions pose excessive risk. It goes the other way, too, suggested one veteran board member: The worst thing is when a management team does not speak out. Directors, another participant pointed out, want management to speak up with its concerns. For both sides to speak up, however, smaller boards make better forums. Seven to eight people can debate strategy, noted one governance veteran, the way a board of 15 cannot. If boards were once more ceremonial than substantive, more honorary than productive, that is a dying tradition in an era when directors are increasingly called or demand to serve as strategic advisors. Several directors reported that their boards regularly conduct 360degree feedback surveys of one another, inviting pany executives to appraise their individual performance as well. One board chair even interviews every board member, asking for their appraisals of the other directors, and he then circles back with feedback, mending each director for his or her contribution to the boardroom but also citing one area for the director39。 Struggles。 Richard Haythornthwaite, chair of MasterCard Worldwide。Andrea Tyson, who serves on the boards of several publicly traded panies, the dialogue drew on the experience of Donald J. Gogel, CEO of Clayton, Dubilier amp。s ranking this year were the two interrelated risks of economic disparities and failing governance. The report warned that the benefits of globalization have not been evenly shared, and when bined with unresponsive or ineffective regimes, resurgent nationalism and populism are a likely product. Evidently, it was just those factors in toxic bination that played a major role in stimulating the popular revolt against the longserving but poorly governed regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. Two other RRN initiatives announced in Davos were intended to furnish country, pany and NGO leaders with better tools for appraising risks and responding to disasters. A new Leading Practices Exchange will provide them with guidance on how to manage and mitigate risks. And a Community of Risk Officers will establish a work for mutual learning and peer counseling among those at the forefront of risk management. The first risks to be tackled by the new work include currency volatility, cyber security and resource scarcity, with others to be added. With this initiative, the World Economic Forum has created an ongoing platform to give those engaged in risk management better access to detailed data, proven practices and experienced players. By way of one example: A physician at the Davos meeting who had been active in recovery from the Haitian earthquake reported that in some areas, relief agencies provided fresh water to survivors free of charge, while in others a modest charge was imposed. The latter practice would help ration and allocate a still scarce resource, vital for recovery. But the physician found that cholera spread far more often through camps that charged for water than through camps that didn39。s 41st annual meeting on both the principles and strategies of risk management. The Forum launched a new Risk Response Network (RRN), an initiative to identify leading global risks and to better equi