Long-term push
Is Milton Friedman rolling over in his grave? The Nobel prize-winning economist would surely have been dismayed over the recent Business Roundtable heresy that corporate decisions should consider all stakeholders instead of being based solely [...]
ESG, meet the SEC
As Environmental, Social and Governance topics continue to attract shareholder interest – 95 social and 20 environmental proposals to date in this proxy season – a few companies are crossing the Rubicon in starting to [...]
New tools for evaluating ESG
As companies increase their communication on their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) actions, there has been a proliferation of ratings and rankings that attempt to assess performance. Inconsistent reporting practices, however, make it difficult to [...]
6 tips to create a valuable Code of Ethics
At the center of your ethics and compliance program, your Code of Ethics radiates far beyond your company’s walls. Its content is paramount, but what is great content if it doesn’t reach its audience? We [...]
Meaningful Message: Inspiring trust through your CEO letter
The letter from the CEO or Chairman may be the most turned-to section in an annual report or proxy statement. Yet, many companies seem to be missing an opportunity to make a meaningful connection with [...]
Be creative when grabbing investors’ attention
Companies seeking to increase their engagement with shareholders are turning to inventive ways of attracting their audience’s attention. To reverse a long-running trend of decreased voting participation by retail investors, Bank of America is donating [...]
Let’s Be Clear
Investors are demanding readers. They are regularly connected to the Internet and expect to find the information they are seeking in just a few clicks. Once on the site, however, the content available and how [...]
Labrador and EY publish new Corporate Governance report
Broad progress by European companies on governance, transparency and other stakeholder priorities is reported in the 2018 Corporate Governance Overview, being published this month by Labrador and EY. The report surveyed 220 companies in four [...]
Keeping Pay Ratio Rational
Takeaways from San Diego The recent pay ratio & proxy disclosure conference in San Diego provided useful insights into how U.S. publicly-traded companies are handling disclosure of how their CEO’s pay compares to that of [...]
5 noteworthy trends from our annual proxy benchmark
For the second year in a row, our benchmark study of the proxy statements filed by Fortune’s 250 largest U.S. firms determined that companies are devoting an increasing amount of attention (and proxy real estate) [...]