Emily Liggett: Informed Oversight Without Operational Interference
Show notes
(0:00) Intro *Reference to the Boardroom Governance Summit at Limerick Lane Cellars, Healdsburg, California (Aug 26-27, 2026)
(2:12) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.
(2:59) Start of interview.
(4:00) Origin Story of Emily, and Stewardship
(6:15) From Engineer to CEO
(7:14) Companies that she led: Elo Touch Systems (97-00), Capstone Turbine (02-03), Apexon (04-07) and NovaTorque (09-17).
(9:50) Changing geopolitics of manufacturing
(10:49) First Boards and Public Company Lessons (first board experience in Japan) "The soft skills are the hard part to do."
(15:48) On serving in private VC-backed boards. "If you know one board, you know one board. I mean, they are all so different."
(22:43) On serving in non-profit boards. "It's one of the best possible ways to get governance experience."
(26:20) CEO Mistakes
(32:03) Board Succession for leadership and skills.
(35:33) Board Evaluations Done Right
(37:41) What Makes Great Directors. *reference to Leading Edge Stewardship, by Linda Riefler and Mayree Clark (Stanford Women on Boards). "Asking the right question, at the right time, in the right way."
(39:57) AI and the Boardroom.
(46:16) Innovation Versus Oversight. "The goal is informed oversight without operational interference"
(49:34) Teaching Governance to Stanford Students
(52:17) Boards need to have a long-term orientation in this short-term world.
(52:34) Books that have greatly influenced her life:
- The Bible
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2012)
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1846)
(54:12) Her mentors. "[T]hey told me things I needed to hear in a way that I could hear them because it's easy to get defensive."
(55:38) Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.' by Margaret Mead.
(56:43) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that she loves.
(57:30) The living person she most admires in governance: Bob Joss.
Emily Liggett serves on the boards of Ultra Clean Technology and Materion Corporation. She also serves as Lecturer at Stanford GSB, where she teaches corporate governance and board leadership.
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Music: “Seeing The Future” by Dexter Britain, via Free Music Archive, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.