The attributes of an effective director are constant regardless of what's going on in the world.
What makes a good director good?
Some attributes of an effective director are constant regardless of what's going on in the world: dedication, integrity, intellectual curiosity, moral courage, and a temperament that enables someone to be a team player. It takes a special person who has been endowed special characteristics to be a good director, which is why not just anyone can do it well.
But directors must also be adaptive to the business environment they find themselves in, and I suspect it has ever been thus. In the 1970s, bank directors were faced with the deregulation of interest rates and the loosening of a regulatory philosophy that had held sway since the Great Depression. In the 1980s, the development of regional merger compacts ushered in the consolidation of what historically had been a highly fragmented industry. The commercial real estate meltdown in the 1990s forced directors to contend with the largest number of bank failures since the depression. And the current decade has brought the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, stricter enforcement of anti-money laundering regulation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, deregulation under the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, and for the very largest banks, a new regulatory capital framework under the Basel II Accords.
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