At this morning’s meeting of New England Chapter National Association of Corporate Directors, a panel of experts struggled to define issues that directors should be worrying about today – issues which might not arise until 2015 or thereafter.

The list of subjects was not surprising. 

In the technology sector, issues of cyber security and cyber crime, with particular focus on protecting customer data by reason of high economic and reputational risk, predominated.  In the patent area, company boards were admonished to establish a portfolio strategy and to pay attention  to whether their enterprise was indemnified against patent risk from third parties and whether they, in turn, were incurring potential liability by indemnifying their own customers.

In the health care sector, the restructuring of the delivery of medical care predominated.  Directors are responsible for establishing a health care strategy to be implemented by management.  There are three trends today:  (1) companies are getting more involved by driving employees to adopt healthy behaviors, to choose better providers, and to pick the right level of insurance; (2) other companies are stepping back, providing a “voucher” to employees and allowing the employees to decide their own level of care, generally by going to private exchanges and rolling their own; and (3) some companies are opting out, by reducing the amount of insurance, not offering insurance to family, and/or not providing insurance for part-time employees (Federal law requires insurance, generally, if you work 30 hours/week or more).  Boards must determine the level of obligation that their company adopts toward its own employees, bearing in mind that there is a tension between saving money by reducing benefits vs attracting better employees by providing benefits.

In the financial services sector, regulatory pressures dominated the discussion, particularly with respect to banks.  Boards must structure themselves to identify and adequately staff, with capable directors, all regulatory requirements, while at the same time fighting for enough agenda time for strategy in an increasingly competitive environment.

In response to a question concerning placing company data on the cloud, panelist Paul Sagan  (a partner at General Catalyst) noted that professional companies managing data in the cloud have much greater expertise than is likely to obtain for most companies protecting their own data and, therefore, placing data in the cloud (while not risk-free) is probably safer.

How accurate are these predictions of important future board focus?  Wendy Watson, chair of the Audit Committee at Citizens (among other Board memberships), noted that current bank regulatory reforms are designed, by necessity, to address failures leading to the 2008 meltdown.  Will they be effective in preventing future meltdowns?  Since risk may appear in situations we cannot even now imagine, no one can be sure that “it” won’t happen again. 

This admonishment, that the future is opaque, should be applied to all predictions.  Indeed, if we had a present and accurate understanding of the future, lives of companies would be more benign, and Board directorship a lot easier than it actually is.