If there is one thing corporate managers (and columnists like us) know well, it’s the experience of pitching what we think are great ideas to an audience—and seeing them enthusiastically ignored. But every once in a while an idea sticks.
That’s what seems to be happening with our proposal from last June to take the process of electing corporate directors to the next level. Behind the scenes, a group of big institutional investors embraced our concept, and they have just produced a practical, candidate-screening template that could affect director elections for the first time in the 2009 proxy season. Corporate ...