Sandra Gobert: European Governance in a Changing World

(0:00) About the Boardroom Governance Summit (Aug 26-27, 2026)  (1:20) Intro (2:45) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel. (3:31) Start of interview.  (4:55) Origin Story of Sandra Gobert (6:04) Sandra’s Career Path (8:56) Guberna and Board Education. Member of EcoDa. (12:00) Family Firms and Control in EU (13:53) Relationship Agreements Explained (examples, Bpost and Proximus) (19:05) State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), and Government involvement on Boards (19:58) The Board’s Emerging Fourth Role: advocacy and policymaking, alongside its traditional strategic, leadership, and oversight responsibilities. (22:52) AI and Alternative Structures. PBCs, Foundations, and other European multi-stakeholder models. (29:25) Employees on the Board ("unacceptable in Belgium"). (31:01) Toward European Harmonization ("We need more Europe, not less Europe") (31:50) The EU Inc. Idea (33:57) Principle-Based Governance ("Comply or Explain" framework) (36:19) The Value of Board Evaluations (41:05) Founder Control in Tech (dual class share structures) (44:05) Europe’s Power Shift  (46:34) China and Global Competition (49:42) Europe’s Economic Pressures (reference to The Economist's interview with Elon Musk) (52:23) Board Dynamics Matter (53:19) Books that have greatly influenced her life: Catherine de Médicis, ou, La reine noire, by Jean Orieux (1986) Passion, by Jude Morgan (2005) The Journey of Leadership by Hans-Werner Kaas, Dana Maor, Kurt Strovink, Ramesh Srinivasan (2024) (54:59) Her mentors.  (55:52) Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by.  (57:09) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that she loves.  (58:05) The living person she most admires in governance: Christine Lagarde. Sandra Gobert is the Executive Director of GUBERNA. Sandra also serves as an independent director of Fluxys Belgium, sits on the board of ecoDa, the European Confederation of Directors Associations, and is a member of the board of Belgium’s Corporate Governance Committee. You can follow Evan on social media at:Website: boardroom-governance.comX: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BoardroomGovernance__To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License