I came across overboarding the other day in the FRC’s Review of Corporate Governance Reporting 2024:
“Many companies used phrases such as ‘no instances of over-boarding were identified during the year’ with no further discussion around the time commitment of their directors.”
Accountants stick an ‘ing’ on a well known nautical expression: ‘man over board’ and give it a new meaning. They could have used ‘above board’ or ‘inboard’, or even better chosen an expression which doesn’t already exist such as off-boarding, away-boarding or under-boarding, but they stole overboard instead. They didn’t choose on board because onboarding already exists.
A quick look up in the Oxford English Dictionary told me overboarding was a transitive verb, meaning to throw overboard. I knew the FRC were not referring to ships or seas in their governance review, nor were they referring to anything related to a ‘piece of timber sawn thin’, which was another of the dictionary definitions. I was amazed to find that we have so many types of boards [1] but fewer using ‘ing’, for instance chopping board, advertising board, sounding board or drawing board. Now we have another: overboarding.
However, it did not take me long to connect overboarding to the board of directors, and to discover that it occurs when a director sits on too many boards: too many to adequately do their job.
The question though, is how does one define too many? Is it the number of boards directors sit on, or is the time they spend on these other boards? The FRC don’t say, but they wanted to let us know, what companies say about whether their directors have enough time to do their work. And they are not happy:
“Those that did (disclose directors time commitments to other organisations) provided very little information on what they considered to determine whether each director has sufficient time to fulfil their duties.”
So now we know. But perhaps the most interesting part of my exercise in discovering overboarding came from the discovery of two other boards. The first is the ‘ouija board’. Here is the quote made by the Oxford English Dictionary from the Middlesboro (Kentucky) Daily News:
“I’ll flip a coin, read my trusty ouija board, resort to alectryomancy, or use some other form of divination.”
I did not know that alectryomancy is telling the future by analysing how a cock pecks on the ground. Nor had I heard of the second board: the arse-board, which is apparently the hinder part of a cart (A. Barrère & C. G. Leland, Dictionary of Slang).
Instead of overboarding, accountants should have used ouija boarding or arse-boarding for their directors.
[1] A few more types of boards: draft-board, side board, skateboard, snowboard, cardboard, sounding board, circuit board, cheese board, chess board, arrival board, running board, drawing board, notice board, blackboard, and floorboard.