Boards are routinely assessed with tools that cannot answer the question that matters most: whether a given director’s accumulated professional experience fits the strategic needs of the specific company on whose board that director sits. This post describes a new method that uses contextualized word embeddings to measure such fit directly, and applies it to Elliott Investment Management’s 2026 campaign at Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings. The analysis finds that NCLH’s pre-campaign board was less aligned with its own strategic identity than the boards of its closest peers, that its directors were unusually similar to one another, and that the post-settlement board narrowed both gaps. With this method, directors and investors can build better boards.

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