Mission-Critical Governance: Focusing on What Matters Most (Security, Audit and Leadership Series)

Corporate governance is failing-not because boards lack intelligence, experience, or diligence, but because the systems they rely on no longer surface the information that truly matters. Across industries and jurisdictions, boards approve strategies, review risk lists, receive assurance reports, and comply with governance codes-yet remain blindsided by catastrophic failures.Safety collapses. Cultural scandals erupt. Financial integrity breaks down. Courts increasingly ask the same question after the fact: Why didn’t the board know?Mission Critical Governance exposes the root cause of this failure: boards govern without a clearly defined purpose and without reliable oversight of the mission-critical objectives that determine enterprise survival and success. Drawing on decades of governance practice, landmark court decisions, behavioural science, and emerging regulatory expectations, this book challenges the dominant “checklist” model of governance and replaces it with a new architecture