Hi, I’m Raffaela — and welcome to AI Leadership Edge, a newsletter for investors and business leaders who want to gain leverage with AI.
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The board is no longer optional
For most of the last fifteen years, the governance layer of a PE-backed portfolio company was treated as table stakes. The board was where you booked quarterly check-ins, approved a budget and refreshed a value creation plan that nobody seriously expected to change. The returns engine sat elsewhere: cheap debt, multiple expansion, and a market that lifted any asset bought at a reasonable price.
That era is over.
McKinsey’s 2026 Global Private Markets Report opens with a now-circulated line:
“Alpha must be made.”
The conditions that did the heavy lifting for a decade (declining rates, expanding multiples, abundant leverage) are gone. Bain’s 2026 Global PE Report puts it more bluntly: “12 is the new 5.” The EBITDA growth a deal now needs to hit a target IRR is more than double what it was at the peak.
When operational value creation has to do more of the work, the board is no longer a check-in. It is the operating system.
And the data shows that the top-quartile PE boards run a fundamentally different operating system from everyone else. Smaller. Faster. Built around the value creation plan rather than around governance theatre. Chaired by operators, not by deal partners. Spending more time on talent than on slides.
Below: the five practices that separate top-quartile portfolio company boards from the rest, with the data, the tactic and the specific action to take by the next board meeting.
🔐 Below the paywall:
The five practices the top-quartile PE-backed boards run, that the bottom-quartile do not
The data behind each one, from NACD, McKinsey, Bain, Egon Zehnder and Heidrick & Struggles
The specific action to take at the next meeting for each practice
Composition, cadence, chair selection, agenda design and talent process, with practical playbooks
What to swap into your next portfolio company board within 90 days of close
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