Twelve weeks, five disciplines.

Duties, liability, and the board–management line.

The duties of care and loyalty, and where director liability actually arises under Caremark and its successors. The line between oversight and management, taught through governance failures on both sides of it. Committee structures, the board calendar, and executive sessions. How to read a board book, worked on a real one.

The central skill of the module is the conversion of an operator's instinct, here is how I would fix it, into a director's question: what would have to be true for management's plan to fail?

Financial fluency, which is where most technical candidacies founder.

Directors are expected to read and question financial statements without assistance. For most technical leaders this is the widest distance between the skill they hold and the skill a nominating committee assumes they hold.

The module covers the 10-K as an oversight instrument, MD&A read against the strategy management presented, non-GAAP adjustments and what they reveal about incentives, internal control over financial reporting and what a material weakness means for a director personally, the audit committee's relationship with its external auditor, and the patterns that commonly precede restatements.

How board searches are actually run.

Who sees a specification first, how long lists become short lists, and where candidates are quietly eliminated. Positioning as an enterprise leader who holds a domain specialty, rather than as a technologist for hire. The board biography and the one-page profile. Interviewing as a candidate director rather than as an executive. And the assessment of an opportunity: D&O terms, litigation and restatement history, controlling-shareholder dynamics, and the culture of the board itself.