Rising from the Mailroom to the Boardroom

Foreword This book will support aspiring professionals, business leaders, and board members in becoming fit for the future. It collates fresh ideas and strategies to help people address daily workplace challenges and ultimately develop in their careers. The author, Bruce Turner, is a well-respected transformational leader who has extensive experience on audit committees and boards, coupled with deep and broad professional governance, risk, compliance and audit experience, across the government, health, manufacturing, and financial services industries. As such, he is positioned to see things through the eyes of an audit committee chairman and board director, so that he clearly reconciles audit committee and board needs with what should be provided. Bruce shares his insights on holistically managing and advancing a career across five decades through storytelling, case studies, practical examples, illustrations and photographs. The visuals are amazing! These insights will inspire the adoption of better practices. He has not shied away from reflecting on both the ups and the downs of the journey to show that even though a career does not always follow a smooth and uneventful trajectory a significant legacy for the wider community sits at the end of the rainbow. The cautionary tales about challenges that can test ones resolve help to open one's eyes to the challenges. The original Four-I Framework for Career Development (intuition, ideas, intent, and impact) reflects on the different stages of a professional career from learning the ropes for a firm career foundation, through helping others succeed and embracing executive challenges, to ultimately shaping high-level boardroom and c-suite agendas. The takeaways are drawn together into 101 building blocks, each one providing crucial career-long learnings. The book is fresh, well-written, relevant, and generates insights that help readers to optimize their impact and outcomes. It will help business leaders, governance, risk, compliance and audit leaders to look beyond the known, enabling them to rewire their inherent thinking processes to accommodate the expectation that they deliver value through relevant insights and foresight, and ultimately meaningful outcomes. Bruce captures the essence of change in the executive summary when he espouses, Governance, risk management, compliance and assurance professionals have evolved from simply sharing a hindsight perspective to delivering fresh insights, and are increasingly expected to demonstrate foresight. In delivering insights and foresight it is crucial to understand the dynamics of conversations in the boardroom and around the audit committee table. This book provides those unique perspectives. The insights immersed throughout this book will aid boards and audit committees to embrace world class oversight practices to their performance and conformance activities by inspiring improvements in the secretariat and others that support them. That will, in turn, help close the gap between what boards and audit committees expect and what is being delivered from business leaders and governance, risk management, compliance and assurance specialists reporting to them. Dan Swanson CIA, CISA, CAP President and CEO of Dan Swanson and Associates Winnipeg, Canada