Private equity firms are making highly visible commitments to address the challenge of sustainability. Market-leading firms, such as The Carlyle Group, EQT, and TPG Capital, now produce sustainability reports and have dedicated executives overseeing sustainability initiatives and embedding sustainability throughout the deal cycle...
Good corporate governance is a bedrock of corporate America, with a central tenet being the board of directors’ role in effectively overseeing and monitoring the firm...
Employees with stock options in a private company face a big obstacle that employees in public companies do not: you cannot sell the stock to fund the exercise price and any taxes...
The Covid-19 pandemic has supercharged the role of chief information officers, accelerating a shift from backroom technicians to front-office decisionmakers, as companies’ operations are increasingly shaped by technology...
When you think of boards, whether it's a board of advisors or a board of directors, you think of big companies. The prevailing wisdom is that boards are for large, established companies. But how did they get big and established? ...
The rapidly growing focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters that marked 2020 continued to shape events for companies operating or based in the U.K. and Europe in 2021. Discussions of ESG are occurring at all levels, from the boardroom to investors to employees, and governments, regulators and companies are all being encouraged to take these matters into consideration...
As shareholders offer proposals seeking to change companies like Facebook and Lyft, they are hitting a wall put up by the executives who launched those companies...
ESG is a popular topic within the investment community. ISS Market Intelligence conducted interviews with 779 financial advisors between July 27th and August 11th, 2021 in order to learn more about advisor perception and behavior when it comes to ESG investing...
Most corporate directors I speak with these days say they face rapidly rising expectations. Overseeing succession, strategy and financial performance were the board’s traditional triad. But now, directors must master a host of new technology challenges as well as issues of corporate culture, talent, diversity and inclusion, climate and public trust...
It is no secret that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently ramped up its focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosures...
In an important decision this week, the Delaware Court of Chancery permitted a Caremark duty-of-oversight claim to proceed against the directors of the Boeing Company. Stockholder plaintiffs sued Boeing’s board, seeking to recover costs and economic losses associated with the crash of two 737 MAX jetliners...
The post-Covid world deals with extremely polarized social, economic and political elements, much more than before the pandemic. It seems that the virus has infected some of these elements, making them better than hoped for, while others have been thrown into their most shameful abysses...
Future-seeking leaders understand there are solid business reasons why attention to ESG is on the rise and that people, risk and capital issues are interconnected across the three factors of ESG (environment, social, governance), treating them accordingly to support purpose and drive performance...
Her platinum-dyed hair is now a softer baby blonde, arranged in a natural wave. The red power lipstick is gone in favour of a fresh-faced nude. The message it sent was clear: arriving at court this week for Silicon Valley’s ‘Trial of the Century’ was a very different Elizabeth Holmes...
Dambisa Moyo wrote the book “How Boards Work” to explain what corporate board members do. She turns to her own personal board of directors for advice on how to do it better. The Zambian-born economist currently serves as a director for three companies: manufacturer 3M Co., energy giant Chevron Corp. and publisher Condé Nast. That assignment, she said, is different than it was just a decade ago. Board members not only have to handle activist fights, acquisitions and questions of succession...
Those who kept tabs on the markets during the summer could be forgiven for thinking activism forgot to take its habitual summer break. Several proxy fights are only now reaching a crescendo, including yesterday’s annual meeting at Box Inc (NYSE:BOX), or giving way to new contentious periods, including deals for Kansas City Southern and Monmouth Real Estate Investment...
When in doubt, go after corporate fat cats. Sensitive to criticism that existing revenue and cost measures won’t fully pay for their proposed $3.5 trillion spending plan , Congressional Democrats have their eyes on lavish executive compensation as a source of revenue. One proposal is an excise tax on companies that buy back a “significant” amount of their own stock. Another would target companies that pay bosses a high multiple of average employee compensation...
Publicly held corporations are facing increasing pressure from a variety of sources to disclose their diversity and pay equity data. Legislative and regulatory changes, activist shareholder groups, and public campaigns are beginning to have an impact...
Professor Marc Steinberg suggests ways in which the decades-old legal framework could be improved...
According to the Capital Asset Pricing Model, the goal of these investors should be to seek to reduce their exposure to “systematic risk” (which is defined as the risk that remains in any portfolio after it is fully diversified)...
Last summer, major public companies across the country pledged to increase diversity in their boardrooms, one of the actions taken after the murder of George Floyd in police custody. Corporate directors set goals, and some have begun to make progress, with investors, activists and others tracking their commitments on racial equity. But conspicuously absent is a discussion of diversity efforts at privately held companies...
Scientists often describe climate change with superlatives. Urgent. Dire. Existential. The superlatives are all bad. Encouragingly, financial economists are devoting more and more attention to the intersection of climate and finance...
Recently a purported shareholder of certain special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) initiated derivative lawsuits asserting that the SPACs are investment companies under the Investment Company Act of 1940, because proceeds from their initial public offerings are invested in short-term treasuries and qualifying money market funds...
