If you have 11 people, you have enough people to...

Field a football team? Well, yes, but you also have enough people to seat the board of directors at 4,000-person engineering, operations, and maintenance services firm Michael Baker Corporation.

The Pittsburgh-based company announced today that it had appointed David Wormley, Ph.D., to its board of directors, bringing the board to 11 members. The 68-year-old Wormley has impressive credentials-- he is currently dean of the college of engineering at Penn State and before coming to Penn State in 1992, he was associate dean of engineering for one year at MIT and previously served as head of MIT's department of mechanical engineering-- but an 11-person board is too many people.

You want your board of directors to be large enough and diverse enough to represent all sides of an issue, but when your board is the size of a hendecagon, there's too much talk and not enough action.

Ed