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Note: James Kristie, author of the article below and editor Directors & Boards, is a member of the Program Panel for the Shareholder Forum's "E-Meetings" program to establish standards for electronic communications associated with annual meetings.

 

Directors & Boards | Boards At Their Best, December 7, 2010 posting

 

Directors & Boards

 

Boards At Their Best

Insights on Leadership and Corporate Governance

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

 

How to Fix the Annual Meeting

 

Johnson & Johnson 1972 Annual Meeting

It seems that no one — management, boards, shareholders — is happy with how annual meetings are conducted these days. Annual meetings can be a frustrating and often futile exercise — in meeting statutory requirements, yes, but not much else as a worthy vehicle for demonstrating corporate leadership and facilitating shareholder relations.

Thus, the cover story for the first Directors & Boards issue of 2011 will be:

What’s Wrong with the Annual Meeting . . . and How to Fix It

I am going to seek a roundup of opinion on what to do about the annual meeting. The seed of this article idea was planted this past summer when I was a peripheral participant in a study group looking at "Electronic Participation in Shareholder Meetings" — i.e., the pros and cons of virtual annual meetings and the practices necessary to hold a meeting that meets the needs of all parties. This group was organized by a close colleague, Gary Lutin, through The Shareholder Forum initiative that he chairs.

The virtual annual meeting will be an important dimension of the discussion, and possibly factor in as a "key fix" — or maybe not, depending on the input I get from important players who are doing virtual meetings or thinking of going in this direction. Early adopters, and their shareholders, have had some rocky initial experiences with virtual meetings.

And there may be other fixes that we should focus on for reconfiguring the annual meeting for a coming governance era of heightened transparency and disclosure.

Stay tuned. It should make for a lively lead article in the Q1 Directors & Boards.

Photo: A Johnson & Johnson annual meting from the 1970s, courtesy of Kilmer House.

 

 

 

 

This Forum program is open, free of charge, to anyone concerned with investor interests in the development of standards for conducting shareholder meetings with electronic participation. As stated in the posted Conditions of Participation, the Forum's purpose is to provide decision-makers with access to information and a free exchange of views on the issues presented in the program's Forum Summary. Each participant is expected to make independent use of information obtained through the Forum, subject to the privacy rights of other participants.  It is a Forum rule that participants will not be identified or quoted without their explicit permission.

The organization of this Forum program was encouraged by Walden Asset Management, and is proceeding with the invited leadership support of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. and Intel Corporation to address issues relevant to broad public interests in marketplace practices, rather than investor decisions relating to only a single company. The Forum may therefore invite program support of several companies that can provide both expertise and examples of leadership relating to the issues being addressed.

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