Louis M. Thompson

Occupy Wall Street activists have protested outside several annual shareholder meetings this spring, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, General Electric, and several others. And they are planning a full schedule of “non-violent direct action” at many more meetings in the coming months. Prudent companies that are targeted will engage in an extensive process of […]

Oh, joy—your company has had a data breach. Now comes the high-wire act of deciding how, and when, to announce that fact to the world. And don’t forget that the whole world might be watching, so your time to decide will be measured in hours, if not minutes. That being said, once a company does […]

If Congress has its way, small companies that want to go public could luck out with a less-rigorous initial public offering process and exemptions from numerous Dodd-Frank Act and Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirements, such as shareholder say-on-pay votes and audits of internal controls over financial reporting. The House of Representatives passed a bill to do all […]

If the United Kingdom adopts binding say-on-pay votes, can the United States be far behind? There’s a history of business regulation taking root in Britain and Europe and then migrating to the United States, especially in the field of corporate governance. Given that potential, what should U.S. public companies do to keep the idea of […]

As we look ahead at what information best-in-class companies will communicate to shareholders in the next year and the methods they will use to communicate it, it’s worth a quick look at the innovations tried last year that did not work or had only marginal success.  In a column last April, I posed the question: […]

The stage is being set in Congress and the White House for a new era of capital-raising for small and micro-cap companies in the name of job creation. However, investors beware! In late October, the House of Representatives passed several bills with a largely bi-partisan vote that would lower the barriers to crowdfunding for the […]

As companies look toward the 2012 proxy season, what can they expect? To answer that question, first take a look at what happened this past proxy season. It was the first year that companies dealt with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new proxy disclosure rules that went into effect last February, prompted by the Dodd-Frank […]

More than four decades ago, conservative economist Milton Friedman wrote in the New York Times Magazine that corporate social responsibility was a “fundamentally subversive doctrine in a free society, and there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits, so long as […]

Most of us can probably remember listening to a parent or teacher tell a story with a morality message designed to affect our behavior by conveying a sense of values, wisdom, or beliefs. While some have suggested that “storytelling” is a lost art, I contend it’s not, particularly in an era of increased use of […]

The billionaire financier is returning funds that clients had invested in the Soros Fund Management’s Quantum Group of Funds, opting instead to run the funds as a personal investment vehicle. Why is one of the most successful investors of all time taking his money and going home? In a word, regulation. Soros claims he is […]