On 8 October I stood on a stage at Circular Lighting Live and shook hands with Nigel Harvey of Recolight while he handed me a wooden letter B. It was not my award. It belonged to Lucent Lighting, who had won a Build Back Better Green award for recycling the aluminium from their own production and putting it back into a new product. The same product had already won a gold design award. They could not be there, so they asked me to collect it for them.
I want to say why that mattered to me, because it is not about the award.
Lucent were my first real client. When I started working with them, the founders had spent decades building a design-led business with a global client list and were beginning to step back. The leadership team was capable but not yet ready to run the business without them. There was no board structure to hold the transition together. We worked on that: who sat round the table, what the table was for, and how decisions would get made when the founders were no longer in the room for all of them.
That engagement finished years ago. I have had no hand in what Lucent have done since. The recycling programme, the new product, the design award, the people who made those decisions, none of it is mine. Which is exactly the point.
When I take on a board role the question I am measuring myself against is not whether the business does well while I am there. It is whether it keeps doing well after I leave. An adviser who makes themselves necessary has failed, however good the numbers look while they are on the payroll. The job is to put a structure in place, make sure the right people own it, and get out of the way.
So the thing I was proudest of on that stage was not the award. It was that a business I stepped away from years ago is still making good decisions on its own, and still thought of me when it needed someone to stand in for them.
That is what I mean when I say the work is a board-level role, not a report and a handshake. The report is finished in months. The board is what is still there afterwards.