Directors overboard: How many seats is too many?

Fortune quoted Feng Gu in a story about overboarding, a practice in which directors agree to serve on more boards than they have capacity to handle. The story also mentions a 2020 paper Gu co-authored that showed that while mean board size decreased from 1996 to 2016, the average number of directorships per person increased. “The amount of work you have to do, the hours you have to put in and the stress of responsibilities have gone up substantially in recent years,” he says. “If a director decides to sign up with another board, this is going to make this director much less available for doing anything.”