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Participant Questions
News Digest
Meeting Observations
April 16, 2010
Dear Forum Participant,
Thanks to all of you who offered
questions and comments to let us know what to start developing.
Participant Questions
A few of the questions can be addressed
this week:
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Who?
I asked Avital Hahn to assume responsibility
for this weekly Review based on my familiarity with her work as
senior editor of The Economist Group’s CFO Magazine and as
assistant managing editor of Thomson’s Investment Dealers’ Digest
(“IDD”). In those positions she’s been covering Forum programs
for over a decade, and was in fact one of the first journalists to
define the “dot-com” problems we addressed in 2000. Ms. Hahn is a
graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, and has been a fellow
of journalism programs at
Columbia as well as
Harvard.
Considering the Review’s purposes –
delivering information to decision-makers and, in support of that,
providing a subject-focused reference resource for journalists and
other researchers – I’ve also asked two members of the Forum’s
Policy Review Board with relevant professional insights to help
guide our progress: Francesco Guerrera, the U.S. Finance and
Business Editor of Financial Times, and Dean Starkman,
head of “The Audit” business reporting section for Columbia
Journalism Review.
- Gary Lutin, Forum chairman |
1. Will Forum participants who
aren't stockholders be able to observe a meeting being considered as an
example? That will be up to each company, just as each company
decides whether non-stockholders can attend their traditional physical
meetings. It's most likely that some of the companies we're observing will
welcome Forum observation, and we will in any event let you know which
ones allow live or archived access.
2. What's the objective of
electronic participation in a shareholder meeting? The easy
answer is, it varies. There are probably as many answers to this as there
are companies. But the essential effect of electronic communication is to
lower your costs, so you have a choice of delivering more or just saving
money on the same old stuff - or, any combination. And, yes, of course,
we'll be reporting a lot more on this.
3. Who is this? Some of
you asked who I am, and how did I end up being responsible for this weekly
Review. While Mr. Lutin offers his response in a
sidebar, I’ll tell you that my own understanding of why I’m doing this
is because all of the details involved, such as attendance validation and
vote processing, are just as strange to me as they will be to the typical
board member or portfolio manager who has to make decisions about how to
“go electronic.” I’ve been covering issues relating to annual meetings for
senior corporate and investor decision-makers for over a decade, and this
is the first time I’ve had to think about whether you can get a control
number to validate a shareholder’s status before he or she asks a
question. Let’s assume this means I’ll understand what needs to be
learned, and that you can count on me to keep at it until I can report
what you need to know for your decisions.
News Digest
We hope most of you saw the report
distributed to Forum participants earlier this week (now
posted on the Forum web site) about the plans of
American Water (NYSE: AWK; $3.7 billion market cap) to conduct its
meeting next month with electronic participation. Since the company has
won considerable respect for its effective reporting and investor
communications, they should provide us with an especially useful example
of what a relatively small non-tech company can do with modern processes.
Meeting
Observations
We now have a list of over a dozen
companies that will be conducting 2010 meetings with electronic
participation, either entirely or in combination with physical meetings.
Please keep the suggestions coming, as well as your thoughts on priorities
for observation so that we can decide which of these meetings may justify
the most attention.
Avital Louria Hahn
E-Meetings Review,
a Shareholder Forum project
516-782-2715
avital.hahn@shareholderforum.com
© 2010 The Shareholder Forum |