What lies ahead for the 2010 proxy season and annual meeting, and why should you care? Simply stated, public companies will face the greatest challenges that most have experienced in recent memory. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent approval of a rule to eliminate broker discretionary voting in director elections presents the most significant challenge […]
Louis M. Thompson
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Digital Media Challenges Shareholder Communications
The world of shareholder communications is in a “Twitter” about what to do with the new social media. To tweet, or not to tweet … that is the question. As most Compliance Week readers likely know, the dominant social media platforms (today) include blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, myriad chat rooms, multimedia sites such as YouTube, […]
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Greater Public Disclosure, Other Tips to Dodge Reg FD
The Securities and Exchange Commission provided some long-overdue guidance in August about proper interpretations of Regulation Fair Disclosure—the first interpretive guidance for Reg FD since the rule went into effect in 2000. It’s a must-read for investor relations and corporate communication officers as well as corporate counsel. To my thinking, no rule affects the day-to-day […]
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Cloaked in Mystery, ETFs Arrive as Investor Kingpins
The world of investor relations began shrinking several years ago with the decline of sell-side analyst research. Today, the game changer is the buy-side’s growing move away from analyzing individual companies in their portfolios and toward the use of asset management. This should alarm any investor relations officer, senior managers, and boards of directors. The […]
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Your Guide to Creating a World-Class IR Function
A Fortune 500 mining company client recently asked me what constitutes a “world-class” investor relations function. That’s a question I periodically pondered during my 24 years as CEO of the National Investor Relations Institute, certainly, but I had never explored it in any formalized manner. Well, I decided to do so, and I’m reporting my […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
The Time Has Come to Embrace Sustainability
Corporate sustainability is here to stay. The real question is how long will it take for the C-suite and boards of directors to adopt a business approach that goes well beyond traditional means of creating and developing corporate value. My last column addressed the issue of shareholder value in terms of how the long-held focus […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Shareholder Value and Your Sustainability Goals
The long-accepted corporate goal of maximizing shareholder value got a real slap-down when corporate icon Jack Welch recently told a reporter: “Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.” What made the comment astonishing was that Welch was a proponent of shareholder value for more than 25 years, during which time General Electric exceeded […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Former Trillium CIO Talks Good Investor Relations
This month, Compliance Week Columnist Lou Thompson is publishing excerpts of a Q&A interview he conducted with Sam Jones, the recently retired chief investment officer at Trillium Asset Management. While at Trillium, Jones was a pioneering advocate for socially responsible investing and emerged as a leading proponent of good governance practices now in the mainstream. […]
Posted inUncategorized
From Websites to Wire Services: Disclosure Wars
Pull your chairs up to your computer screens, everyone: A battle is brewing online about the correct way to disclose material, non-public corporate information to investors. Of course, I’m all for a good cyber-space spitting contest, and the broad contours of this particular fight are worth the attention of any senior executive who deals with […]
Posted inTechnology
Blogs: If Used Properly, an Investor-Friendly Tool
Investor relations may finally be entering the world of the blog, an Internet communications concept that began some 10 years ago. Blogs are a wonderful tool with great potential, so of course Corporate America has been late to adopt them. But finally, we’re seeing progress. A few brave CEOs have, for several years, created their […]
