In performing research on a company or a particular director on a company’s board, it is often helpful to identify the company’s other board members and the other corporate boards on which those board members serve.
“They Rule“ is an extraordinary website that uses flash player to visualize a database that the rather interesting Josh On has created on certain publicly-owned corporate and institutional boards. You can choose either a particular board member or simply a corporate board. Then, the site will map the corporate board by identifying each board member, and then you can select a particular board member and it will map out each corporate board on which the board member serves. This process has amazing possibilities for tracking relationships between various corporate boards. Heck, I even expect Kevin Bacon to pop up before long!
To test “They Rule,” I plugged in the name of former Georgia senator Sam Nunn. He is on four boards and this is the map that “They Rule” produced:

Hat tip to Boing Boing via Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolutions for the link to this useful tool.