Governance books, research, memos and audio to while away a GRC summer
I hope you get to unplug this August, at the beach or by a lake or in the mountains. If you’re like me, however, you’re busy loading up your iPad, your Kindle or your carry-on with everything you’ve been meaning to read (or listen to) but haven’t had the time for. Here are a few ideas to get you started. Email me with other suggestions to add to the online version of this list.
Must-read business books: The latest buzz is all about John Brooks’ Business adventures: twelve classic tales from the world of Wall Street, published in 1969, gifted to Bill Gates by Warren Buffett in 1991 and resurrected by the Gates Foundation in 2014. Then there’s the latest from the Freakonomics gang, Think like a freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. New York Times Deal Professor Steven Davidoff calls Erik Gerding’s Law, bubbles, and financial regulation ‘a page-turner with a legal bent.’ I confess: I haven’t read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, so it’s definitely on my list.
Serious weight: PrawfsBlawg recently wrapped up a book club discussion on Christopher Bruner’s Corporate governance in the common-law world: the political foundations of shareholder power, published last year. Another tome discussed in the blogosphere is Wharton prof Eric Orts’ Business persons: a legal theory of the firm. Then there’s the most important but least-read economics book of the century from French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the twenty-first century.
Drilling down: do PDFs count as beach reading? NACD just issued its Directors’ handbook on cyber-risk oversight – timely and essential. Getting into a subset of cyber-risk, here’s a concise summary of survey results from another Corporate Secretary partner, Bridgeway: ‘Benchmark report: corporate governance information management’. The various reports and recommendations from the Conference Board Task Force on Corporate/Investor Engagement are a few months old, so now’s the time to catch up.
Specially from IRRCi: Reports from Jon Lukomnik’s Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute are well worth the megabytes, especially an April piece authored by the Sustainable Investments Institute, ‘Board oversight of sustainability issues’. On the same topic as the Conference Board’s piece mentioned above, IRRCi commissioned ISS to write ‘Defining engagement: an update on the evolving relationship between shareholders, directors and executives’. IRRCi also offers two academic studies that won its annual investor research competition: ‘Informed options trading prior to M&A announcements: insider trading?’ and ‘Playing it safe? Managerial preferences, risk, and agency conflicts’.
West Coast brains: Stanford Business School has a raft of good research available, including a piece for the Conference Board, ‘How well do corporate directors know senior management?’.
Don’t forget a stack of law firm memos, preferably storing them as PDFs (or emailed to your Kindle) rather than killing trees. A couple of excellent new pieces on activism are Latham & Watkins’ ‘Hushmail: are activist hedge funds breaking bad?’ and ‘The resilient rights plan: recent poison pill developments and trends’. Lucian Bebchuk’s Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation is always an excellent pointer to memos like these.
On your run or in the car: why read when you can listen? It’s just unfortunate that all those webinars you never had time for typically are streamed and can’t be downloaded to listen to at the lake. The ‘Governance Minutes’ series from the Society of Corporate Secretaries & Governance Professionals is an exception. These short interviews come as downloadable MP4 videos but you can listen to them fine on most devices. Practising Law Institute and the American Law Institute each have lecture series available to purchase as MP3 audio files, though the CLE credit process can be complicated that way. Yale Law School uploaded some corporate law lectures as podcasts a few years ago and they may still be worth a listen. In fact, iTunes U is an extraordinary trove of free lectures on all kinds of topics, including talks from Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and and hundreds of other schools.
Guilty pleasures: I don’t suppose you come to Corporate Secretary for fiction recommendations but here goes. The thriller of the year may be I am a pilgrim, the first novel by screenwriter Terry Hayes (Mad Max 2, Dead Calm). It’s already being made into a movie. Too bad Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel will only come out in September, just too late for the beach. I’m told it will be this year’s Gone Girl. At least there’s a moody new between-the-wars fix by Alan Furst just out, Midnight in Europe. These would all make for good listening in the car, too. Audio books are especially great for car journeys with kids. My son is still at the Peter and the wolf stage, but my nieces, ages seven to 10, are kept rapt for entire six-hour car trips by Bloody Jack.
Update: Suggestions from readers
The company secretary: building trust through governance should be holiday reading for every corporate secretary, writes Peter Swabey, policy and research director at the UK's Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators.
