s mentioned elsewhere in this issue, activist investors, the press, and assorted other “noisemakers” sure piled onto Symantec Corporation, following their first-ever totally virtual annual meeting.
We were kind of glad they did…first because it proved the point we tried to make to Tim Smith of Walden Asset Management in spades: That not only is there no place to hide in cyberspace, any real or perceived meeting missteps will surface and make the rounds in a cyber-second, so there is a built-in self-correction feature to VMs that can’t be beat.
A second great thing about virtual meetings is that you can usually tune in the archived webcast, as we did here…and listen to any rough or questionable patches as often as you’d like…and make up your own mind about the overall fairness and effectiveness of the meeting, which we also did.
So here are a few observations which readers can check out for themselves – and a few suggestions for possible improvements next year:
When we logged on to the Symantec site, we were favorably impressed right off the bat – and a bit surprised in light of all the press coverage that made them sound like bad people – to note that they are on Fortune’s Most Admired List and on Ethisphere’s list of Most Ethical Companies.
We were a little disappointed that the pictures and names and business affiliations of the Directors were so small we couldn’t see them clearly…and that we couldn’t simply “click” on them, to enlarge them as they were “introduced”…but no big deal, really.
But oops! They did not really get introduced individually… and may or may not have been listening in…which was one of the major complaints. We were a bit surprised that Symantec either did not know, or simply forgot, that not having Directors attend the meeting is a major no-no with investors (remember the big flaps at Home Depot, Johnson Controls and Morgan Stanley when most directors failed to show a few years ago?) And it seemed particularly inexcusable to have no-shows at a virtual meeting, where all the Directors needed to do to “attend” was to boot up their computer or pick up the phone. We can be sure that like the three companies above, Symantec will not make that mistake again.
We’re probably a bit biased here, but oops again…We were startled to hear that the Inspector of Election was the Corporate Secretary. While there appeared to be nothing at all that was controversial – until the noisemakers piped up, that is – not having a clearly neutral party as Inspector is hardly a best practice – especially when you’re trying something new, like a VM.
The “business part” of the meeting – the election of directors, ratification of auditors and approval of increases in shares allocated to two equity incentive plans – was conducted briskly, efficiently and effectively, we thought… and over in a blessedly brief nine minutes, although they made a minor misstep by closing the polls before the question period officially opened: Please note, dear readers, that this is really the only part of the meeting where questions MUST be entertained. The “general discussion” and any “open Q&A period” is solely at the discretion of the Chair, and almost always takes place AFTER the official meeting is officially adjourned. But the “window” for entering questions was open the entire time, and there were NO questions on the items being voted on, so no harm, no foul.
We found the CEO’s presentation on the business – and on their strategy going forward – to be very well articulated and very well done overall. The slides that appeared on the side of the screen were well written and very much on-point – and properly forward-looking too, we thought…and this part lasted about 16 minutes.
As we’ve said on many other occasions, we are big fans of live “video streaming” – mainly in the hope that it will force the management team to come up with something that will hold the audience’s attention better than slides. We’ve long opined that watching ANY annual meeting is like watching paint dry…and watching only slides is like watching already dry paint get drier. And we DO like to check out the body language, quirks, tics and other potential “tells” of the management speakers – especially when being questioned – and ideally, the reactions of directors too, which makes the meeting moderately more interesting. But hey… this meeting was at least partly about saving money on the meeting itself, and there were zero riveting moments expected (or actual) with such a routine agenda…so we’d issue a “pass” here: The streaming video, while not a fortune, is a lot more expensive than audio only.
Now for the really important questions that were raised about the meeting:
Do we think that Symantec intentionally tried to forestall difficult questions, or to “game” the question period to “mute dissident voices”? Absolutely not: It does seem, based solely on assertions from people who say they tried to email Qs and failed to get through, that there may have been some delays in transmission times over the web. But if you listen to the replay, there was ample notice that the question period was set to open…and a statement that so far, only the two questions that were answered had been received – plus ample notice – and what we considered to be more than ample waiting time – about 10 seconds – before the question period was closed.
Do we think that Symantec rephrased or paraphrased the questions in a “softball” manner as some of the questioners seemed to assert? Not at all: They key question, asserting that Symantec “repeatedly failed to return shareholder value” and asking “what specifically does management intend to do to reverse losses over the years” seemed very clear and very blunt, at least to this listener. Interestingly, the answers to this question had actually been provided in the closing bullet-points of the CEO’s prepared remarks, which did seem to us to throw the CEO off a tiny bit at first. But he re-stated the points he’d just made just fine, although perhaps not as neatly bulleted as earlier: The second question struck us as more of a complaint against the virtual-only format, and we at least, thought the answer was a decent one, and totally sincere; that as a technology company, they wanted to use technology, and that they would likely reach a much larger audience, as indeed they did. They certainly convinced US that they thought it would be a good idea, and that certainly, there was no malice aforethought, as many of the “noisemakers” implied.
One still-open issue for virtual meetings in general: There is a very real and very understandable concern on the part of investors that questions will intentionally be re-phrased as “softballs” or shut-off too early – or that the really tough questions will somehow, inexplicably, get lost in cyberspace.
Intel, BestBuy and others have acknowledged that this is an issue that needs addressing: perhaps with a posted list of ALL the questions asked before and during the meeting…including the ones that were answered in the prepared remarks, questions that were duplicative of others to some extent and questions that were either not on point or just plain dopey.
Our own suggested best practice is that in addition to accepting questions over the web – both before and during the meeting – companies should also have an open phone line, where questioners can queue up – by hitting the star key – to ask a question on a first-come-first-served basis. This may actually generate a few “riveting moments” – some of which may need bleeping. But it seems well worth the effort – to achieve the desired “transparency” and to answer legitimate concerns about pre-screening – and to add a bit of suspense…and maybe a bit of drama too to a normally dull event.
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