About Me

I have made it a personal mission to provoke thought and highlight the need for evolving corporate governance with a strong ethical focus for better, sustainable businesses. An ex- Financial Times staff journalist, when I returned to professional life as an independent after a long career break, we were talking a great deal about ethics - in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

But the conversations did not join up then and the world has changed a great deal since the 2020 pandemic. The role of business in helping to forge a society in which we want to live has become critical, a responsibility.

When I launched my blog Board Talk, it was intended to capture the nuances of journalistic observation that did not always make it into a story for publication in the mainstream media around the drive for gender diversity. The name was suggested by a senior business woman. No more “bored talk” she said, suggesting that the conversation in and around the U.K.’s boardrooms needed to be livened up, made more real.

Asked the dreaded but inevitable “what do you do ?” by a guest at a smart business dinner once, a colleague interjected: “Dina says the things that should be said - but people don’t say them, even if they know them to be true - AND (he paused for effect and a smile in my direction), she gets away with it.”

I loved the moment. It hasn’t got easier to do that: say the things that should be said. It is now very easy to express an opinion, much harder to say something thoughtful that matters, and reaches the audience you want. it to reach. We all suffer from an overload of information and opinion, and seemingly less time to digest it as we grapple with technological change and a new way of working and living.

Board Talk quickly picked up generous commercial sponsorship with no editorial control, an editorial dream - and my website became my media platform. As a regular contributor to the Financial Times, I enjoyed a good run of interviews with senior business people, CEOs and Chairs and CFOs…..trying always to reflect a wide selection of people, and also those willing to trust me with a mix of both the personal and the professional story. As ever in FT editorial policy, they did not see the copy before publication, and they were often surprisingly open. It made for good copy. My name in the FT’s search engine works. As a contributor to Forbes (2013-2017) under the ‘Leadership’ banner, I was allowed free rein to go where my intellectual curiosity and journalistic skills carried me, and the archive is online.

I was early to pick up on the ripple of interest in environmental, societal and governance (ESG) concerns for business, investors and stakeholders with a focus on climate risk, and to extend that concern to the rise of the gig economy. On Forbes in 2016 I highlighted pensions as a corporate governance issue. The challenges of technological transformation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution have featured prominently in all my writing.

Over the years I have built contacts at senior levels across public and private sectors, and I enjoy connecting people. My work extended my global network around responsible business and investment. I have worked on board consultancy projects and more recently a project for ICAEW around the new boardroom agenda - why directors are more important than ever.

I spent three years on the first Alumni Advisory Board for the University of Cambridge, and was Deputy Chair of its Communications Working Group, with Sir Paul Judge as Chair. I have an international upbringing: Indian-born, I grew up in Washington, DC and was educated in the United States as well as Britain.

I am quieter now on social media, but you will find me on LinkedIn, present but barely on X (Twitter when I joined in 2008) and on all platforms @dinamedland, with a creative life on Instagram. I have increased the time I spend enjoying the U.K’s creative industries and the way in which they offer a route straight through to human connection, without the silos we seem to fall into too easily, in business and the public sector. I have been working as a supporting artist in the entertainment industry in the last year, and loving it.

In my travels on Twitter (now X) in the early days, I started a lighthearted awareness campaign around issues involving boardrooms and corporate governance by posting a cartoon every Sunday, some of which are still on this site. Some look dated and more do not.

More than a decade on, recognition of the importance of clearly demarcated ethical values for sustainable business remains so important, sitting quietly amid the noise.

Source - The New Yorker