Starbucks ($SBUX) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 3/20/2013. ProxyDemocracy.org had collected the votes of six funds when I checked on 3/15/2012. I voted with management 56% of the time. View Proxy Statement. Warning: Be sure to vote each item on the proxy. Any items left blank will be voted in favor of management’s recommendations. (See Broken Windows & Proxy Vote Rigging – Both Invite More Serious Crime) Continue Reading →
Tag Archives | CEO pay
Reasonable Compensation: We Propose a Role for Investors in Taking on the Income Inequality Challenge
The following is a guest post by Michelle de Cordova, Director, Corporate Engagement & Public Policy, NEI Investments. The article originally appeared on the NEI Investments website and is reproduced here with permission from both the author and the firm. NEI Investments (NEI) is a mutual fund company that “makes excellent, independent portfolio managers accessible to Canadian retail investors through two award-winning fund families: Northwest Funds and Ethical Funds.” It also has Canada’s largest team of in-house socially responsible investing specialists. Continue Reading →
Broadridge ($BR): How I Voted – Proxy Score 50%
Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. ($BR) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 11/15/2012. ProxyDemocracy.org had collected the votes of two funds when I voted on 11/8/2012. I voted with management 50% of the time. View Proxy Statement. Warning: Be sure to vote each item on the proxy. Any items left blank will be voted in favor of management’s recommendations. (See Don’t Let Companies Change Shareholders’ Blank Votes) Continue Reading →
Hain Celestial ($HAIN): How I Voted – Proxy Score 8%
Hain Celestial Group ($HAIN) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 11/15/2012. ProxyDemocracy.org had collected the votes of two funds when I voted on 11/8/2012. I voted with management 8% of the time. View Proxy Statement. Warning: Be sure to vote each item on the proxy. Any items left blank will be voted in favor of management’s recommendations. (See Don’t Let Companies Change Shareholders’ Blank Votes) Continue Reading →
What Happens When ISS Gets the Numbers Wrong?
A complimentary 90-minute webinar co-sponsored by Eagle Rock Proxy Advisors and Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, LLP will be held at 2:00 p.m., EDT, on Thursday, November 1, 2012. Register now. Continue Reading →
Step Into the Corporate Governance Way Back Machine for September
Time to step into the way back machine to see what we were writing about 5, 10 and 15 years ago. Five years ago @ Corporate Governance, I was pleading for readers to send comments to the SEC on their proxy access proposals. 30,000 letters wasn’t enough, in my opinion.
A shareholder proposal calling for a “say-on-pay” vote by shareowners on executive compensation at Activision Inc. (ATVI) filed by As You Sow received 69% of the vote at the company’s annual meeting held in Beverly Hills, California. This may be the highest vote result so far of about 50 say-on-pay proposals voted on by shareowners this year. Activision is a publisher of video games including Quake, Doom and Guitar Hero, and is currently all the news for its purchase of Bizarre Creations Ltd., the UK studio behind the popular Project Gotham Racing title. (Activision to Purchase U.K.’s Bizarre Creations, WSJ, 9/27/07) Conrad MacKerron, Director, Corporate Social Responsibility Program at the As You Sow Foundation, criticized the company for providing outrageous perks like paying the mortgages, Medicare taxes, and even pet-sitting for executives. Continue Reading →
A New Strategy to Fight Citizens United
Guest post from Kent Greenfield. Author, ‘The Myth of Choice’; law professor at Boston College. This article is adapted from a more substantial essay in the Fall 2012 issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and appeared previously on Huffington Post, 9/15/2012.
We progressives have been in quite a tizzy about Citizens United, especially now that 2012 election cycle is swamped with Super PAC money. Citizens United, you’ll remember, is the 2010 Supreme Court case saying that corporations have the same rights to engage in political speech as you and I do. In response, a number of progressives have proposed constitutional amendmentsto do away with corporate “personhood.” Continue Reading →
FedEx (FDX): How I Voted – Proxy Score 69%
FedEx ($FDX) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 9/24/2012. ProxyDemocracy.org had collected the votes of four funds when I voted on 9/18/2012. (A fifth fund is now reporting.) I voted with management 69% of the time. Continue Reading →
Responsible Wealth Targets Being Selected
Fall is filing time for Responsible Wealth’s annual shareholder resolutions. Currently, Mike Lapham is working with the Center for Political Accountability to identify which corporations Responsible Wealth will file resolutions with. Continue Reading →
Video Friday: Clawback Invoked
With the passage of the Dodd-Frank and the Sarbanes Oxley Acts, clawback policies have become increasingly prevalent among public companies. However, it is rare to find a company actually put a clawback policy into effect. Citing Equilar’s findings from the 2012 Clawback Policies Report, we review what a clawback policy is and we examine what triggered one major U.S. bank to put their clawback policy into action. Continue Reading →
Step Into the Corporate Governance Way Back Machine
Time to step into the way back machine to see what we were reporting on 5, 10 and 15 years ago.
Five Years Ago @ CorpGov.net: The Main Topic was Proxy Access
Video Friday: Roger Martin – Fixing the Game
The common belief that firms exists to maximize shareholder value has led to massive growth in stock-based compensation for executives and a naive and wrongheaded coupling of the “real” market (the business of designing, making and selling products and services) with the “expectations” market (the business of trading stocks, options and complex derivatives). It’s a bit like confusing winning the Super Bowl with winning a bet on the Super Bowl. Continue Reading →
The Problem with Pay for Performance
How Not to Argue for Bonuses. Reprinted with permission from PIRC Alerts, 17 July 2012. PIRC is the UK’s leading independent research and advisory consultancy providing services to institutional investors on corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. Continue Reading →
Co-ops, Shareholder Engagement, Swedish CEOs & Split Roles
Important news tidbits you may have missed.
The co-operative sector in the UK, which reached £35.6 billion, outperformed the mainstream economy from 2008 to 2011 by over 20 per cent, growing 19.6% while Continue Reading →
Failed SOP Companies Become Targets
I’m bookmarking 2012 Say-on-Pay Votes: Fulfilled Expectations, Though Not Without Surprises by Shirley Westcott of Alliance Advisors, LLC. for future reference. Continue Reading →
Google: How I Voted – Proxy Score 42
Google ($GOOG) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 6/21/2012. Voting ends 6/20 on Moxy Vote’s proxy voting platform, which had 9 recommendations “from good causes,” including 3 consolidations, when I checked and voted on 6/17/2012. ProxyDemocracy.org had information on 5 funds voting. I voted with management 42% of the time.
Continue Reading →
Video Friday: Female CEOs Earn More for Shareowners but Paid Less
Equilar anchor Bonnie Day compares male and female compensation at the top, with key findings from the 2012 S&P 500 CEO Continue Reading →
Biogen: How I Voted – Proxy Score 63
Biogen Idec (BIIB)($BIIB) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 6/8/2012. Voting ends on 6/7 at Moxy Vote’s proxy voting platform, which had 6 recommendations “from good causes,” including 2 consolidations, when I checked and voted on 6/5. ProxyDemocracy.org had 6 funds voting. I voted Continue Reading →
De-emphasizing Pay for Performance
It is common knowledge that people are not driven solely by the prospect of financial rewards. Yet, in business, motivational tools for top executives—particularly the CEO—almost singularly comprise financial incentives. In 1980, only 10 percent of the UK’s largest FTSE100 companies utilized incentive arrangements (in the form of cash and stock-based variable pay). Today, they are universally employed as a matter of best practice and variable Continue Reading →
Take Action: Tell SEC to Require Disclosure of CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios
Click here now to tell the SEC to require companies to disclose CEO-to-worker pay ratios. If you own stock, click here to get information on how to vote your shares on “say-on-pay” proxy proposals. Continue Reading →
Ferro (FOE): Will Shareowners Vote for Change?
Ferro (FOE) is not one of the stocks in my portfolio but I did help in reviewing companies I thought were good candidates for a proxy access proposal and I did help design the proposal submitted to FOE, so I’m offering my voting advice. Continue Reading →
Advice from AFL-CIO & CorpGov.net on Exec Pay & the 99%
Richard L. Trumka, President, AFL-CIO announced an update to their PayWatch website—this year’s version is called CEO Pay and the 99%. Trumka says it’s your one-stop shop for the most recent information on out-of-control CEO pay and what you can do to stop it. Continue Reading →
British Petroleum (BP): How I Voted
British Petroleum (BP) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 4/12/2012. Voting ends 4/11 on Moxy Vote’s proxy voting platform, which had no voting Continue Reading →
Schlumberger (SLB): How I Voted
Schlumberger (SLB) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 4/11/2012 in Curacao, frequently referred to as “one of the Caribbean’s best-kept secrets,” and not easy to get to from Continue Reading →
Where’s the Boss? And What Counts as “Work”?
Last week the Wall Street Journal printed an article describing how CEOs around the world spend their time. The article drew on data from a larger study, the Executive Time Use Project, and relied on reports of time use by CEO’s personal assistants. The article indicates that assistants only tracked activities that lasted Continue Reading →
Parsing the Vote: CEO Pay Characteristics Relative to Shareholder Dissent
That’s the title of a new report from ISS on the factors that contributed to significant investor opposition during last year’s say-on-pay votes at U.S. companies. From the summary: Continue Reading →
SVNAD – Executive Comp: Every CEO Above Average!
The stock market still has not recovered from the meltdown of 2008, and many companies have had severe reductions in their workforces, but CEO compensation of major U.S. companies rose 36.5% last year. Why is there this disconnect between stock market performance, mass layoffs and CEO compensation? What should boards of directors be doing to better align CEO Continue Reading →
CII Contract with Equilar a Positive Step But More Needed to Address Pay Issue
Equilar, the leading provider of executive compensation benchmarking and research solutions, announced the release of its Pay-For-Performance Analytics suite yesterday, along with the fact that the Council of Institutional Investors (CII), whose members hold $3 trillion in assets, has signed on as the first client. According to the press release:
By combining an innovative market-based algorithm to identify peer companies with a realizable pay methodology using long Continue Reading →
Walgreen: How I Voted
Walgreen Co. (WAG) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on January 11. Voting on MoxyVote.com‘s platform ends January 10. When I last looked, MoxyVote.com had recommendations from seven “good causes,” which included three consolidations. ProxyDemocracy.org had five Continue Reading →
Friday Video Supplement: Every CEO Above Average
SVNACD Program 1/19/2012; 7:30-8:00 a.m. Continental Breakfast; 8:00-9:30 a.m. Palo Alto, CA
The stock market still has not recovered from the meltdown of 2008, and many companies have had severe reductions in their workforces, but CEO Continue Reading →
Median CEO Compensation Up 28% in 2010 Says GMI
GMI released their CEO Pay Survey 2011, one of the largest surveys of CEO compensation in North America, based on analysis of the Russell 3000 and S&P 500 companies. Key findings include:
- Total Realized Compensation in the S&P 500 rose by about 36 percent.
- Total Realized Compensation in the Russell 1000 rose by more Continue Reading →
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
The Media is No Friend of Corporate Directors, writes T.K. Kerstetter. That’s right, and it is time boards took action to avoid giving shareowners good reason to vote against directors or the pay packages they authorize. Kerstetter is upset because after talking to the press about the appointment of former Governor and one-time Nashville mayor Phil Continue Reading →
Harvard Institutional Investors Roundtable
The Harvard Institutional Investors Roundtable will convene tomorrow, bringing prominent members of the institutional investor world together focus on lessons from the first year of say-on-pay votes. During the second Continue Reading →
The Church and Occupy London: What Would Jesus Do?
PIRC Alerts November 8 issue carries an article pointing to an increasingly restive Church of England about executive pay and ethics in the City.
The Church has struggled to find an appropriate way of responding to the Occupy London demonstrators (holding camp in front of St Paul’s Cathedral). However, this is clearly Continue Reading →
Boards of the Future: A Conversation With Richard W. Leblanc
Professor Richard W. Leblanc recently posted an article to his blog titled The Boardroom of the Future: Changes that will reshape corporate governance that merits wide exposure. Leblanc is a tenured, award-winning teacher and researcher, consultant, lawyer and specialist on boards of directors… a recipient of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40™ award. His research expertise is in corporate governance, specifically in the effectiveness of boards of directors.
At first read, I loved the post… but then got thinking the devil is in the details. My questions and comments are in italics. Professor Leblanc is a provocateur, setting us thinking and perhaps taking necessary action now. A day later, here is an updated version with Leblanc’s responses below my questions and comments.
Democratization of governance
Your shareholders will nominate and elect your directors by electronic voting Continue Reading →