The Deal Magazine’s wonderful collection of articles on what it chooses to call the corporate governance complex covers everything from activists to pension funds to academics to, you’ve guessed it, lawyers.
Everything is relatively uncontroversial until you get into the lawyer videos. Ira Millstein is alright, he’s been around long enough not to make too many sweeping statements, but Charles Nathan, a partner at Latham & Watkins comes up with a particularly patronizing little video about corporate governance is like religion.
Once you’ve got the god of corporate governance you just adopt the 10 commandments and never have to question anything ever again.
Just accept Bob Monks into your life, people.
I’ve never heard such a lot of nonsense. We don’t even all agree with each other at The Corporate Library, never mind agree with Risk Metrics!
And since when have governance geeks held a monopoly on so-called “received wisdom”? As if it’s any more or less likely that the corporate community would swallow without question a set of pre-conceived ideas about how corporations should be run. Or any other group for that matter.
Then we have Amy Goodman of Gibson, Dunn bewailing the blunt instrument of Say on Pay because the company doesn’t know what it is that shareholders are objecting to. Is it severance, is it the bonus, is it the perks…?
Ask?
I mean, let’s think for a minute here. Motorola, we just voted more than $8 billion worth of shares against compensation, you think we might want to tell you why?
And if they didn’t ask before the meeting, whose fault is that?
Paul Hodgson - Senior Research Associate
