Homebuilder Taylor Morrison launched its board fellowship program, a first-of-its-kind initiative to offer paid board experience and on-the-job training to executives from underrepresented backgrounds. Good news if you subscribe to Alan Greenspan’s underwear sales index theory: Men are replacing their threadbare briefs. In a sign of the times, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business launched a course on leadership in a unionized workplace. Nella Domenici, most recently CFO at Dataminr, was appointed as an independent director at Cognizant. Lisa Edwards, executive chair of the Diligent Institute and former senior executive at Salesforce, was appointed to the LogicMonitor board. Robert Henrikson will retire from the Invesco board in May. Invesco tapped Beth Johnson and Todd Gibbons for its board Gibbons is the former CEO of BNY Mellon, and Johnson is the chief experience officer and head of ESG at Citizens Financial Group. Brent Saunders will assume the chair role at Bausch & Lomb when he becomes CEO next month. Bath & Body Works added Lucy Brady, president of grocery and snacks at Conagra Brands, to its board. Paula Johnson, president of Wellesley College, was appointed to the Johnson & Johnson board of directors. COOs and presidents remained most likely to land CEO jobs, though the data showed a spike in CFO-to-CEO promotions. 📖 Bookmark: The average age for new S&P 500 CEOs dropped from 56 to 54 in 2022, according to a new report from Spencer Stuart. “That person is no longer with the Mavs.” 📹 Watch: “I did have someone who told his team not to embrace the 100-day plan because I would be gone in 90 days because it was just a PR stunt,” Cynthia Marshall, CEO of the Dallas Mavericks, explains in this insightful interview with Fortune. It also found that only 20% of board members feel underpaid for their work, despite spending more hours in meetings.
👓 Read: Some 64% of board members think employees have too much leverage in the workplace, according to Diligent Institute’s What Directors Think survey. Harvard Business Review explores how the best leaders shift between command-and-control and power-sharing leadership models On the Agenda Navy SEAL teams switch from the pure command-and-control mode of missions to after-action reviews-at which everyone is expected to share criticisms, suggestions, and kudos equally-all present take off their stripes and other signs of rank to signal a temporary flattening of the hierarchy.”
Lila MacLellan lilamaclellan A Word of Advice “Companies don’t necessarily know which issue they’re going to have to engage on in a given proxy season-it may be several, it may be none-but it’s well worth keeping a global perspective on what’s happening in the marketplace.” “The employee piece is a broad umbrella for issues related to the attractiveness of working for a specific company, in specific locations, and workers’ rights, safety, equity, and diversity,” says Black. And, in an early win for one coalition of investors, Apple’s board just agreed to an audit of its response to unionization efforts. Those who see abortion rights as a business and employee retention matter have already put boards on warning. Meanwhile, cause-based activists are expected to make waves this year, too. “Workers demanding more from their employers is an essential feature of effective capitalism,” the BlackRock chief wrote. Shareholder resolutions about racial equity also continue to see strong support from investors, says Black, noting that Larry Fink’s 2022 annual letter to CEOs highlighted the changing relationship between companies and employees. But the report cites examples from 2022 when traditional activists sought to hold companies accountable for failing to protect workers from sexual harassment (part of Legion Partners’ challenge to Guess directors) and for keeping employees safe on the job (one of several concerns Elliott Management brought to Canada’s Suncor Energy.) In Europe, an expert told Insightia he expects the cost of living and worker pay rates, especially compared to CEO compensation, to become flashpoints in 2023. Let’s be clear, activist campaigns are typically tied to cost-cutting and mass layoffs, and that’s unlikely to change.
Surprisingly, investor interest in the worker experience also surfaces in the review, pointing to a potential trend.
Activists will push companies to focus on margins, not growth, and capital allocation and other standard concerns will face investor scrutiny. Josh Black, Insightia’s editor-in-chief, says the sell-off in the markets, the arrival of the universal proxy card, and new regulatory requirements have created fertile ground for even more proxy fights this year. (Insightia is owned by Diligent, which sponsors this newsletter.) The report found that activist investors targeted 967 companies globally in 2022, up from 913 in 2021. That’s the topline takeaway from this year’s Shareholder Activism Annual Review by Insightia, a research firm.
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