Not because I was a woman - rare as they are on the boards of leading businesses - but because I had come from marketing. It is incredible that of the FTSE 100 companies, only 13 have chief executives with a marketing background.
And even at rank-and-file boardroom level, the representation of professional marketers is pitifully low. In a recent Chartered Institute of Marketing survey of marketing professionals (all sectors, all regions, all sizes of company) 68% of respondents agreed that marketing is represented on the boards of their companies - but only 20% of those stated that this representation was actually by professional marketers. And in 32% of the companies surveyed there was no boardroom marketing representation of any sort.
In the same survey, when asked for the key driver of their company's success, 53% said sales, 27% said finance, 11% customer service and only 9% nominated marketing. So we have just 9% of marketers believing that their own area of business is the key driver behind their company's success.
Another survey, by Synesis, reported that 80% of marketing managers themselves considered marketing to be tactical rather than strategic - aiming for the short-term fix rather than the achievement of a long-term objective.
Which may go some way to explaining why, according to the London Business School, boards devote nine times more attention to counting and spending the cash flow than they do to wondering where it comes from and how it can be increased.
Marks & Spencer has now publicly removed its marketing director from the board, and announced that it has decided it no longer needs a marketing specialist at board level. So what is to be done about such a poor state of affairs for marketing, and also for UK business? I believe that if they are not to be completely and perhaps terminally marginalised, marketers have to address themselves with eagerness and commitment to two closely related areas of activity.
The first is to increase the importance of formal training and qualifications.
For far too long the CIM exams and even MBAs have been undervalued in comparison with 'on the job training'. How would company boards react to the notion that their lawyers, doctors and accountants will now have no formal qualifications, but it won't matter because they have impressive 'work experience'?
The second is the development of the language and tools marketers need to demonstrate the effectiveness of marketing and its accountability to company boards. Helped by valuable contributions from the London Business School and others, marketing's professional bodies are working hard to promote a more objective assessment. The CIM's new Marketing Effectiveness ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 and the Marketing Society Awards are both on the right track.
As Sainsbury's group chief executive, Sir Peter Davis, said recently of the latter: "The evidence which best satisfies the judges will carry at least equal weight with sceptical colleagues in other management disciplines."
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