Corporate governance is complicated, and I usually don’t like to think too much about it because it’s just hard. However, I recently came across two very interesting and insightful articles, one from Harvard Business Review and the other from Atlantic with conclusion against each other on Activism. I hope this thinking process will be beneficial to me, and to my readers, in building up knowledge base and investment philosophy.

First, let’s go through a quick summary of the articles.

HBR, in their 2017 May-June magazine, published a package of articles titled “Managing for the long term” [link here], with a core article of “The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership” written by two well-regarded HBS professors Joseph Bower and Lynn Paine. The article started with the Valeant-Allergan acquisition drama involving Bill Ackman (by the way, I agree that Valeant was a questionable company which adopted questionable business practices and didn’t create social value. So I am with Allergan and this article on this point), and followed by challenges on the most widely used agency-based model in context of the corporate governance and proposed a new entity-based model which essentially proposes to gives company more discretion (i.e. power) by loosening them from the agent-principal handcuff. A quick summary chart exempted from the article below.

This article is thoroughly contemplated and aimed justifiably at the core issue of the capital market – Short-termism, however may have gone too far to directly link Short-termism to Activism. Thus, I have some reservation on some minor points, mainly due to this linkage (which could be a separate write-up, so I won’t elaborate here), but overall think it’s a great step to tackle such a socially important issue and think this new model may have profound impact on future corporate governance.

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