Recruiting a Director & Spiders

Brad Feld and I put up another post in our Corporate Governance series.  It's here and called "Recruiting a New Director".

For about a year now I've been giving a lot of thought to the idea of a tailored LinkedIn-like service that is specifically and only for corporate directors (private and public companies).  To get a feel for what this might look like - feel like - I loaded WikidPad on my computer a couple weekends ago and built a wiki/database of public companies and their directors. 

In about 3 hours of googling, and copying and pasting - I had a wiki instance that included 58 companies and 252 names - all interconnected, all interlinked. 

What jumps out at you as you do this exercise is the notion that some of the names you find - are individuals that sit on more than a couple companies boards.  Slowly but surely - I found some folks that had 4, 5, even 6 board seats.   I called these people "spiders" and using WikidPad, started tracking these folks - tagged as such. 

Keeping in mind that this database I was building wasn't  necessarily 100% accurate and up to date - here's a thought that jumped out at me:

Sam Nunn, the former Senator from Georgia is  a "spider" - he currently sits on 4 boards:  Coca Cola, General Electric, Dell, and Chevron.   His co-board member on Dell is Michael Miles (who sits on 6 boards and therefore another "spider").  Michael Miles' MorganStanley co-board member is Erskine Bowles (who sits on 2 boards - Morgan and General Motors).

Wanna bet that if a board seat at GM opens up - Sam Nunn's name is likely to come up?