This article first appeared in Capital, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 14, 2017 - August 20, 2017

SO, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have heard the name Raline Shah by now.

Airline bigwig Tan Sri Tony Fernandes took to Instagram last week to let all and sundry know that the 32-year-old actress from Indonesia was now an independent commissioner — that’s Indonesian speak for independent director, by the way — at AirAsia Indonesia.

The news sent social media into overdrive. No surprises there. Corporates sometimes appoint celebrities to endorse their brand (yawnsville, no big deal), but it’s rare that they get celebrities to join their boards.

And so, when it happens and the celebrity is someone as young, glamorous and gorgeous as Raline — admit it, you stalked her just a little bit on Google after seeing her photo on Tony’s Instagram — everyone and his cousin had something to say about it.

Reactions ran along the lines of: “Wah, she so pretty!” “So young can become director ah?” Since this is a kid-friendly paper, we’ll omit the more crass comments out there — suffice to say, there were some.

But seriously, does it matter what people think? The fact that people are talking about it at all is already a triumph for AirAsia Indonesia. It’s turned people’s attention to the airline ahead of its planned initial public offering. “A real coup readying our company for IPO,” goes Tony’s gleeful post about her appointment.

Raline’s a highly unusual choice for an indie director, for sure, but her appointment also speaks volumes for boardroom diversity. Here in Malaysia, we’re so caught up trying to meet that controversial target of having women make up 30% of corporate boards that it can easily slip our minds that diversity is not just about gender — it’s also about age (hello, Public Bank!) and diversity of thought and perspective, among others.

We’ve clearly been distracted by Raline’s good looks — we can’t help it! — but let’s not forget she’s also a political science graduate from the National University of Singapore (it’s not easy getting into NUS, okay) and would presumably have the smarts to offer a fresh, youthful perspective to boardroom discussions. AirAsia is, after all, an airline that targets the young.

So, people, let’s all put on our sane hats and not be so quick to write off Raline. A 2011 study by the University of Missouri in the US shows that it isn’t unusual for a company’s shares to experience some lift-off when a brand-name — be it an entertainer, athlete or former politician — is added to the board.

It happened with Weight Watchers International Inc — the share price doubled in 2015 when it announced that celebrity heavyweight Oprah Winfrey was buying a tenth of the company and joining its board.

Okay, so Oprah hasn’t had the best track record since joining as a director. She collected the biggest compensation among Weight Watchers’ directors last year — US$264,753, to be exact, more than twice that of the second-highest-paid director — despite being the only one who attended less than 75% of the board’s meetings.

One can only imagine how the other directors might gripe about this over their low-fat cheese and crackers at such meetings.

These days, there aren’t many celebrity directors left in the US. At one time, Deepak Chopra served on the board of Men’s Wearhouse, while basketball star Michael Jordan was a director at sunglasses company Oakley Inc. But after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, US regulators got a lot more strict about companies hiring famous people because — gasp! — directors actually have really heavy oversight duties and should be committed to carrying them out.

So, it’ll be interesting to see how Raline fares. But in the meantime, who’s for Datuk Nicole David becoming a director at CIMB Group, or Yuna at Telekom Malaysia?

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