The Board-Centric Annual Meeting
Rasing The Bar For Board Communication
More “Hot Issues for Your Annual Meeting”
There is still time to bone up – and maybe right now is the very best time to do so – to be sure you are up to snuff on what really IS hot on the shareholder meeting scene…
Some Early Returns from The Shareholder Meeting Scene: What’s Hot – And What’s Not
What’s the hottest thing for corporate citizens to be worried about as we head into the big spring meeting season?
Virtual Meetings Gain Traction
This year, through June, Broadridge has enabled 140 Virtual Shareholder Meetings – almost all of them “virtual-only” – with no in-person attendees
What To Do If The Power Goes Off At Your Shareholder Meeting… While The Fire Alarms Shriek Alarmingly
How’s this for a shareholder meeting horror-story to take to heart?
The Weirdest Events To Cross Our Desk During The Spring Meeting Season
Despite the relatively quiet season on the whole, we, and our Team of 50 Independent Inspectors of Election, experienced more weird and wacky events than ever before – and more events where corporate managers, and in many cases their outside counsel too, seemed way behind the curve.
A Quick Overview Of The Big Spring Meeting Season…Plus Our Bets On Next Year’s Hottest Meeting Issues
The big spring meeting season was surprisingly uneventful on the whole – with lots of proxy-access proposals passing – or being adopted voluntarily – and with most says-on-pay sailing by with 90%+ margins…much as we’d predicted.
Now’s the Time to Start on Your Annual Meeting Briefing Book, as Ethics and Compliance Issues Jump to the Top of Activist and Issuer Agendas
Back when the Volkswagen scandals first began to break – which seems like ages ago now – we warned readers that ethics and compliance issues were certain to move to the top-of-mind where shareholders of every stripe are concerned.
Re-Tooling your IR and Governance Tool-Kits
How we communicate with each other, investors, and consumers is rapidly changing
Our Newly Revised Primer on Tabulation and Reporting Shareholder Meeting Votes
We last issued our primer on tabulating and reporting on shareholder meeting votes in 2009 – and, since then, there have been so many changes in the landscape, we realized that an updated version was due…right about now…so here it is:
The World Of Shareholder Meetings
An Interview With Michael Mackey, President, Alliance Advisors, LLC
The Original “Shareholder Activists” and the Founders of the Modern Corporate Governance Movement
Your editor-in-chief was fortunate to have been a witness to dozens and dozens of ‘performances’ by the Gilbert brothers at shareholder meetings, where he came to know them both.
Why Companies & Investors Are Embracing Real Online Annual Reports
Will U.S. Companies Take a Cue from Their European Counterparts & Jump on This Rising Trend? By Erwin Groenendal of Tangelo Software Annual reports serve a vital function. Aside from fulfilling the SEC’s requirements with the Form 10-K, substantial annual reports...Insights on some of the most important tools and skill-sets that public companies need to have at the ready as we head into the 2017 proxy season…
Interview with Bruce Goldfarb, President & CEO of Okapi Partners
Improve Your Retail Vote
Interview with Ellen Philip, ELLEN PHILIP Associates The Optimizer’s Editor In Chief Interviews Ellen Philip of Ellen Philip Associates “Among the first things that issuers need to do this year, is to step back a bit, take a hard, fresh, numbers-oriented look at...Our Top Takeaways From The Spring 2015 Annual Meeting Season
The biggest takeaway, by far, is how much smooth sailing those proxy access proposals with 3% ownership and 3-year holding periods encountered… pretty much as we predicted.
The Best, The Worst… And The Weirdest Annual Meeting Developments We Saw This Spring
Let’s lead off on a high note, with some of the best meetings your editor attended – and where there were some nice innovations worth passing along:
Our Promised Checklist Of The Best Practices To Gear Up Early For Your Annual Meeting of Shareholders
For the majority of our readers, their annual meetings are six months or more away as we write this…
Holy Land Priciples Seem Cool But Generate Lots Of Heat At Shareholder Meetings: Coming Soon To 500+ Companies
Nine shareholder resolutions will come to a vote in 2016 on The Holy Land Principles – “an 8-point corporate code of conduct for American companies doing business in Israel-Palestine” according to a press release signed by the fiery Irish-American priest and preacher, Father Sean Mc Manus.
Some Bests (Microsoft, Chevron And Hasbro) And Worsts (“The VWAPS Of G-E”) On The 2015 Shareholder Engagement And Meeting Materials Scenes
Regular readers are well aware, we hope, of our frustration with the overall presentations of shareholder meeting and voting materials over the web.
Activists And Other “Financial Engineers” Drive M&A And Restructuring Acivities To Alltime Highs As We Get Set For The 2016 Annual Meeting Season
An all-time record number of “deals” were announced in 2015 – falling just shy of the $5 trillion mark, at $4.7 trillion.
Major Shockers Rock The Governance World
Big After-Shocks To Come, And A Major “Raising Of The Bars” Across The Board, We Predict… So Get Ready We love to crow about our long record of predicting “the next big thing in the corporate governance world” - but you sure don’t need a crystal ball this fall to know...Have You Carelessly “Stratified-Out” Your Most Loyal Voters?
Long-term readers will recall, we hope, our many articles on “The Best and Worst Annual Meeting Materials to Cross Our Desk” each year – many of which inspired readers to do better, we were told – many of which engendered hearty belly-laughs – and some of which inspired pure pity, for the poor fools who’d fouled up badly.
The Chairman’s “Briefing Book”: Time For A New Look
Corporate Secretaries, meeting planners, IRO folks andothergovernanceprofessionalsaskabout Annual Meeting Briefing-Book practices at virtually every conference on such matters we’ve ever attended.
Here’s Another Sea-Change Re: “Social” And “Sustainability” Proposals: It’s Not “Just About The Nuns” Anymore
In late March, your editor attended a dinner meeting where a very, very lively discussion of the newest and “hottest topics” that attendees feel are out there on the Annual Meeting front super- charged the entire evening.
