About Me

I have made it a personal mission to provoke thought and highlight the need for excellent, evolving corporate governance with a strong ethical focus for better, sustainable businesses. An ex- Financial Times staff journalist, when I returned to professional life as an independent many years later we were talking a great deal about ethics in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But the conversations did not join up then as they are starting to do today as we look to the future after a pandemic and to the role of business in helping to forge the society in which we want to live.

In the last few years since the pandemic, like many of us, I have been working out where I want to be. When I have little to say, I tend to keep quiet.

My first website in 2009 showcased a portfolio of writing. Two years later, as a regular contributor to the FT, I enjoyed a myriad of good conversations with business leaders and senior figures in regulation, governance and thinking circles, leading to strong relationships based on trust. I was delighted to interview many of them for the FT. This came about as a result of my decision to cover the U.K. Government’s drive for female representation in FTSE 350 boardrooms.

When I launched my independent blog Board Talk, it was intended to capture the nuances of journalistic observation that did not always make it into a story for publication in the mainstream media around the drive for gender diversity. The name was suggested by a senior business woman No more “bored talk” she said, suggesting that the conversation in and around the U.K.’s boardrooms needed to be livened up, starting with the need for diversity and inclusion.

Asked the dreaded “what do you do ?” by a guest at St James’s Palace at a smart dinner once, a colleague gave me what I considered to be the best introduction ever: “Dina says the things that should be said - but people don’t say them, even if they know they are true - and gets away with it.”

Board Talk quickly picked up generous commercial sponsorship, with no editorial control, renewed for four years. My website was now my media platform. The internet was kind, and I went from being invisible to being very visible, with global reach. A few years on, an influential PR noted that I had created a brand, with a surprising capacity for engagement. I have worked with several think-tanks and businesses large and small in a consultancy as well as a writing capacity and with the regulator the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) around communication and live events.

As a contributor to Forbes (2013-2017) under the ‘Leadership’ banner, I was allowed free rein to go where my intellectual curiosity and journalistic skills carried me. I was early to pick up on the ripple of interest in environmental, societal and governance (ESG) concerns for business, investors and stakeholders with a focus on climate risk, and to extend that concern to the rise of the gig economy. On Forbes in 2016 I highlighted pensions as a corporate governance issue. The challenges of technological transformation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution have featured prominently in all my writing, as has the urgent need for diversity and inclusion for fairer, more representative and more productive businesses.

I have sometimes worked with those I have interviewed in the past, notably Helen Pitcher, an experienced Chairman, board member, board facilitator and coach and a driver of diversity and inclusion. For Helen I wrote a long-standing regular Governance Watch opinion column for her boardroom consultancy, after being asked to do something similar for others including the International Bar Association.

Over the years I have built strong connections at the most senior levels across public and private sectors. My work with the Principles for Responsible Investment helped extend my global network around responsible business and investment. Most recently, in 2022 and 2023, I worked with Sunday, the content marketing people, on a multi-month, multi-media project for ICAEW around the new boardroom agenda - why directors are more important than ever.

Looking back, my networks and my interest in building better businesses go back to 2002, when I worked with Laura D’Andrea Tyson, then Dean of London Business School, on her report on the Recruitment and Development of Non-Executive Directors. Since then, I have worked with a wide range of stakeholders on collaborative efforts to determine ways for business to be better aligned to create and deliver societal value.

I was on the steering group for the London-based cross-party think-tank, the Centre for Progressive Capitalism, where I was in illustrious company with a contribution (on pensions) to a book published in June 2017. I am a Visiting Fellow at the think tank CPP rolled into, the Centre for Progressive Policy, and have worked with the Oslo-based global initiative, Future Boards. I am also an Associate Fellow at Canning House - where the U.K. meets Latin America and Iberia - around its focus on sustainable development.

I spent three years on the first Alumni Advisory Board for the University of Cambridge, and was Deputy Chair of its Communications Working Group. I have an international upbringing: Indian-born, I grew up in Washington, DC, where I attended National Cathedral School. I attended Trinity College, Cambridge for an M.Phil, a third degree following a second gained at Somerville College, Oxford, and a first at Wellesley College in the United States.

On my digital footprint - you will find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter @dinamedland, on Instagram.

In my travels on Twitter in the early days, I started a lighthearted awareness campaign around issues involving boardrooms and corporate governance by posting a cartoon every Sunday, some of which are still on the site. More than a decade on, recognition of the importance of clearly demarcated ethical values for sustainable business is ever more acute, with interest steadily rising.

Source - The New Yorker