Human beings are wonderful amnesiacs, an observation grounded in the history of traumatic events which have faded gradually into oblivion. That may well be the case with the current pandemic. For instance, how did societies, corporations and their governance system cope with recent dramatic events (so called “Black Swans” or for the more statistically inclined […]

Michel Nadeau, executive manager at the Institute for Governance and former deputy CEO at Caisse de dépôt, weighs in on Bombardier’s struggles. He says that while he believes the company will survive, it will be a much small corporation. He also says that there is a 50% chance that the Montreal-based business will still be […]

There is a frenzied rush to get/give a new ‘right” to shareholders, the right to put up their own nominees for board membership. Boards of directors, so goes a dominant opinion, are not to be fully trusted to pick the right kind of people as directors or to shift the membership swiftly as circumstances change, […]

In July 2017, Dow Jones, goaded by the reaction to Snapchat having gone public with a class of shares without voting rights, announced that, after extensive consultation, it had decided to henceforth eliminate companies with dual-class shares from its indices, in particular the S&P 500 Index. Over the last 10 years, putting money in passive […]

In July of this year, Dow-Jones, goaded by the reaction to Snapchat having gone public with a class of shares without voting rights, announced that, after extensive consultation, it had decided to henceforth eliminate dual-class companies from its indices, in particular the S&P 500 Index. Over the last ten years, putting money in passive index funds has become […]

Corporate America started the year ready to engage with a controversial but business-minded president. This week CEOs have risen in chorus to denounce Trump’s lackluster response to racism. Not since the 1930s, when prominent business heads publicly broke with Franklin Roosevelt, has a US president seen such a revolt by leading business executives. [ … […]

[ … ] a growing body of academic research has confirmed that short-term financial activists are a major contributor to systemic short-termism in managing businesses and investments. The notion that activist attacks increase, rather than undermine, long-term value creation has been resoundingly discredited. Economists Yvan Allaire and François Dauphin, for example, demonstrated in a series […]

There is a frenzied rush for shareholders to get a new ‘right”, the right to put up their own nominees for board membership. Boards of directors, so goes a dominant opinion, are not to be fully trusted to pick the right kind of people as directors or to shift the membership swiftly as circumstances change. […]

“The Institute for the Governance of Private and Public Organizations (IGOPP) announced today the release of their most recent policy paper on executive compensation, entitled “Pay for Value: Cutting the Gordian Knot of Executive Compensation”. The policy paper, prepared by Professor Yvan Allaire for the working group on compensation of IGOPP, noted that, “We are […]

The federal minister of finance is wrong to think a national securities commission would lower risk. Give the federal minister of finance his due: He is nothing if not persistent. Rebuffed by the Supreme Court of Canada in a unanimous and blunt judgment, the minister is trying to squeeze a national securities commission through the […]

“History never repeats itself. Mankind always does.” – Voltaire How did this unparalleled financial crisis come about? How can it be explained in simple terms? How can we learn from it and avoid making the same mistakes in future? The problem – the direct cause of the crisis – can be traced to a series […]

The wave of mergers and acquisitions rolls on unabated, the latest statistics putting the number of transactions worldwide at some 34,000 in 1999. Canada has been an active participant in this global phenomenon. In 2000, there were close to 1300 transactions, worth some C$234 billion, in which Canadian companies took part. Canadians were involved in […]

The business press has recently chronicled many corporations that are experiencing momentous shifts in strategic orientation. Reference is often made to corporation’s market repositioning, acquisitions and divestitures, structural changes, etc. However, when reporting on such major strategic changes, the press has also begun  to emphasize the softer dimensions, such as values, culture, and mind-sets. Thus, […]