1. Own the board's usefulness.
Willink, straight: if the board isn't creating value, that's the founder's failure, not the board's. G&K's contribution is the mutual dependence framing — the board depends on you for the information it needs to be any use at all, and it's your job to make the relationship work, not theirs. In practice: when the board disengages, fix the briefing before questioning the members. This is the mindset shift the Chair is installing in Stages 1–2, and it's what makes the other two principles land.
Habit mapping: Adaptive Board — state the ask; tell the board what helped and what didn't.
Instrument: briefing quality is the primary measure precisely because this principle says it's the founder's lever.

2. Brief for the role, not the room.
G&K: understand their goals, pressures and blind spots, understand your own style, and communicate in the form they can use. Adapted for a board, "they" is the role of independent adviser, not the individuals — membership rotates, the role doesn't. So: every item is labelled decision / advice / noting; the recommendation is up front; the question is framed against purpose so the board can test alignment rather than approve; the relevant is present and the irrelevant absent. G&K's "use their time selectively" belongs here too — bring the right decisions and keep the rest.
Habit mapping: Mission Guardrails and Decision Velocity.
Instrument: the Stage 2 exit test — a pre-read a member who wasn't in the room could act on.

3. Be dependable and unfiltered.
G&K's last three items — keep them informed, be honest, be dependable — compressed into one. Indicators reported before they're asked for, bad news first and fast, commitments kept between meetings, stakeholder input presented as evidence rather than curated for comfort. The counter-intuitive part for a founder is that this means voluntarily giving up the information advantage that has protected them so far; that's why it's built as a habit through repetition rather than explained once.
Habit mapping: Acceleration-Safe Controls and Stakeholder Voice.
Instrument: Chair-scored habit frequency, plus divergence between Chair and CE self-assessment as a spin detector.

Deliberately left out of G&K: adapting to the boss's personality. Useful for a line manager, a distraction for a board, and it lets a founder off the hook — "they just don't get me" is the opposite of Principle 1.

The short form for teaching: Own it. Frame it. Front it. Own the outcome, frame the question, front the truth.