April 12, 2006
The Directormap Project
I have added a cool site – The Directormap Project – from Jackie Cook, a Senior Research Associate at The Corporate Library, to our “Majority Vote Movement” Practice Area. The site publishes the results of director elections, including a chart of the director results for the past few years and another chart showing the largest spread between the least supported board nominees and the average of other nominees (with more than a 30% difference). Jackie also has put together this page that lists all the majority vote shareholder proposals that will be on the ballot this year, including links to the proxy materials of each company and their annual meeting date. Thanks to Jim McRitchie over at CorpGov.net for pointing this out!
More Majority Vote Proposal Results
As ISS reports in this article, the majority vote proposal at Morgan Stanley’s annual meeting last week received only 40% of votes cast. Morgan Stanley is among those companies adopting director resignation policies – and this showing was similar to the support received last month by shareholder proposals at three other companies that have adopted director resignation policies (as noted in this blog).
In comparison, a majority vote proposal at Novell’s annual meeting two weeks ago won 61.7% of votes cast – that company has not adopted a director resignation policy.
Disaster Planning
In this podcast, Glenn Pomerantz, a Director of Insurance Claim Services at BDO Seidman, provides some pointers regarding disaster planning, including:
– What are companies doing these days to prepare for natural disasters?
– Is there really any way to prepare for disasters like Hurricane Katrina?
– Which industries are most vulnerable?
– What can businesses expect from their insurers?
– How are things looking in New Orleans?