Amazon 2023. Fair Elections is just one of many issues to be voted on before the annual meeting at 9:00 am Pacific on May 24, 2023. Vote Against Bezos, Cooper, Gorelick, Huttenlocher, McGrath, Rubinstein, Stonesifer; For Fair Elections #15 & many shareholder proposals. Join the meeting with your control number. (more…)
Free Proxy Advisor? Yes. As You Sow and iconik have teamed up to offer free, set-it-and-forget-it, ESG-aligned proxy voting to enable shareholder democracy for millions of individual investors. The same service is also available to small institutional investors for a very small fee. (more…)
Fair elections have long been a major concern. When I started CorpGov.net in 1995, most directors were probably chosen by CEOs. Elections resembled those of North Korea. Vote for management’s slate or withhold your vote. Fair elections? I didn’t think so. My friends toiled mostly in socially responsible investments, focused on double bottom line impacts and […]
The following guest post originally appeared as a 2019 supplement to The Shareholder Service Optimizer. See Publishers Note at the bottom of this post for more details on how it was changed and how it is relevant to both issuers and employee shareholders. (more…)
Meta Platforms should address inequality by helping to establish an ownership culture where all Americans are shareholders with a voice in corporate activity, especially at corporations where they are employed. Voting in favor of the shareholder proposal outlined below will send a message not only to Mark Zuckerberg but to all those who currently control […]
Aerovironment 2021 annual meeting is September 24, 9AM Pacific Time. To attend, vote, and submit questions during the Annual Meeting visit here. You will also need your 11-digit voter control number and password AVAV2021 (case sensitive). Of course, I recommend voting in advance. To enhance corporate governance and long-term value, vote FOR all items, including Transition […]
Worker Voice and the New Corporate Boardroom is a new paper from the Aspen Institute Business & Society, based on a series of roundtables Idea Lab on Worker Voice in Corporate Governance. Whether the focus is on wages, worker health & safety or diversity, equity & inclusion, the year 2020 opened up new conversations about […]
True Shareholder Democracy? Jeff Sommer at the New York Times thinks he’s glimpsed the future. (A Glimpse of a Future With True Shareholder Democracy) He is off the mark but focuses on a fundamental issue, John Coates’ The Problem of Twelve. Should twelve people control US public companies? True Shareholder Democracy? More important than INDEX’s […]
Amazon 2021 annual meeting is May 26, 9 AM Pacific Time. To attend, vote, and submit questions during the Annual Meeting visit here. You will need the control number you got from ProxyVote or elsewhere. Amazon will limit questions to one per shareholder. Of course, I recommend voting in advance online by May 25. To […]
Stryker Corporation 2021 annual meeting is May 5, 2021, at 11AM Pacific Time. To attend, vote, and submit questions during the Annual Meeting visit www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/SYK2021 and enter the 16-digit control number. With my broker (TD Ameritrade), the only place I can find that control number is in a “vote now!” email I received long ago. If you deleted […]
Edwards Lifescience 2021 annual meeting is May 4, 10 AM Pacific Time. To attend, vote, and submit questions during the Annual Meeting visit www.proxydocs.com/EW. They do not make it easy. I had to put in my control number, which was not in the TDAmeritrade library where I vote proxies. I had to find the control number […]
Empowering Employees 2021 through workers on boards, workers councils, director liaisons, and/or ESOP trusts. Help us move to more democratic workplace cultures. (more…)
Participation by every American family in the market and in corporate governance is needed to address growing inequality, sense of powerlessness and slowing growth rate. As long as 84% of corporate stock is owned and controlled by 10% of Americans, corporations will not be trusted; nor should they be. (more…)
Corporate governance at Facebook is much closer to being a dictatorship than a democracy. Who is the better model, George Washington or Vladimir Putin? (more…)
Nell Minow is one of my heroes. Her 1991 book with Bob Monks, Power and Accountability: Restoring the Balances of Power Between Corporations and Society, helped me give a name and framework to what I thought was the world’s most important overlooked problem — corporate governance. During the last 27 years, I have never met […]
The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan reviewed from something of a corporate governance perspective. The final victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars led to rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct, the […]
The following is a coalition letter on Twitter, Co-ops and Democracy — specifically on our proxy proposal #4 Exit to Democratic Ownership. Take Action: vote before midnight Sunday (San Francisco time) by phone or electronic proxy OR vote on Monday at the Twitter annual meeting in San Francisco. This is part of the #WeAreTwitter movement, well documented […]
Twitter has been an important tool to promote democracy – think #ArabSpring, #BackLivesMatter, #OccupyWallStreet, #WomenOnBoards, etc. Now, through #BuyTwitter @ BuyThisPlatform, Twitter is being called on to explore its own form of corporate governance – how the company itself can be more democratic and inclusive. The results could have implications for the future of capitalism. Take Action: On May 22 […]
McDonald’s shareholders will vote on a proposal to give franchisees a seat on its corporate board of directors at their annual meeting in May. See ‘McD’s must let investors vote on proposal to give franchisees a board seat.’ (Crain’s) Could similar, more inclusive, proposals use preferred shares to create new forms of stakeholder democracy? A report at […]
https://www.sec.gov/News/Speech/Detail/Speech/1365171515808
Shareholder Empowerment: An Introduction Shareholder Empowerment: A New Era in Corporate Governance (link) by Maria Goranova and Lori Verstegen Ryan (editors) is the best book on corporate governance I have read in quite some time. No, it does not have all the answers but it does ask many of the right questions. For an academic reader, I found it […]
Take Action: Comment on SEC’s Rule 14a-8(i)(9) Review As proxy season draws to an end, managers, boards and their legal advisors are calling on the SEC to allow companies to exclude shareholder proposals if a company includes a proxy proposal on the same subject, even if it would do the opposite of the shareholder proposal. […]
Five years ago today the US Supreme Court held that corporations could spend unlimited funds on election campaigns in their decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Last night I joined about 100 people a local showing of Pay 2 Play: Democracy’s High Stakes. I highly recommend it. See the film with a group and […]
I think it was Dina Medland who got many of us in the #corpgov Twitter world, tweeting cartoons on Sunday (#cartoonsunday). These tweets and retweets get ‘read’ far more than most of our actual work-related efforts, certainly more than mine. Thankfully, they offer a quick distraction and usually a hint of insight on the weekend when most […]
Corporate Governance Publisher’s Note: Yes, you’ll find many broken links in the material referenced below. After 5, 10 and 15 years, the internet moves on. Many of the organization’s linked have since gone under. We’re just glad to still be here, offering our readers a sense of the history we have shared. More about the WABAC […]
Below is an email I sent to Pensions & Investments (P&I) editorial chief Barry Burr praising their editorial enhancing fiduciary duty and opining on how it may speed the arrival of the time when retail investors will vote their values with the simple push of a button or two on their cell phones. I will follow […]
ITC Holdings $ITC, is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 5/21/2014. ProxyDemocracy.org had collected the votes of no funds when I checked and voted on 5/15/2014. I voted with management 50% of the time. View Proxy Statement. Read Warnings below. My proxy voting recommendations follow. (more…)
EMC Corporation $EMC is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 4/30/2014. ProxyDemocracy.org had collected the votes of four funds when I checked and voted on 4/22/2014. I voted with management 13% of the time. View EMC’s Proxy Statement, which is user friendly. (more…)
The Preface to this book is so powerful that I have to begin my review with the words of the authors, Janet Dine and Marios Koutsias. The thesis of this book argues that national corporate governance is extremely important for societies. Recently many scholars have said that a convergence of corporate governance is inevitable. We […]
From a CSES Lecture Series event held on February 6th, 2014 at Cornell University. Gerald (Jerry) Davis presented his research “The Coming Collapse of the American Corporation (and What Comes Next)?” Shareholder-owned corporations were the central pillars of the US economy in the twentieth century. Due to the success of the shareholder value movement and […]
Corporation Nation (Haney Foundation Series) by Robert E. Wright delves into the history of the corporation, particularly in pre-Civil War United States (the antebellum period). Like the earlier reviewed Shareholder Democracies?: Corporate Governance in Britain and Ireland before 1850, Corporation Nation addresses central issues such as agency theory, democracy and public interest through the lens of history. Despite […]
After posting Cisco Systems: Prime Target For Proxy Advisor Competition, Cisco Systems: Proxy Proposal #5 – 11 Q&A, and Cisco Systems (CSCO): How I Voted – Proxy Score 56 I am still getting the most basic question from funds trying to determine how to vote. That’s understandable. People lack the time necessary to analyze proxy issues. That’s one of […]
I have a ‘no-action’ request by Apple on my desk. They are fighting my attempt to include consideration of a proxy access proposal at their next annual meeting. Like most no-action requests to the SEC, this one is full of dry uninspired attempts to raise procedural minutiae as a basis for exclusion. Also sitting on my […]
The next European Academy of Management conference will take place in Valencia (Spain) between the 4th and the 7th of June 2014. The conference will be held at the Valencia Conference Centre and the Faculty of Economics of University of Valencia. The theme of the conference, Waves and Winds of Strategic Leadership for Sustainable Competitiveness, […]