Book recommendation: The Shareholder Action Guide

In a new series of posts, SGI will offer reviews and suggestions of books related to our work in shareholder advocacy.

For those who want an inspirational primer about shareholder advocacy, Andrew Behar’s The Shareholder Action Guide: Unleash Your Hidden Powers to Hold Corporations Accountable fits the bill. Replete with anecdotes and advice, coupled with references to on-line resources, this book explains the tools and strategies available to empower shareholders. Further, this handbook may well inspire new activist shareholders to demand corporate accountability.

The author leads As You Sow, a nonprofit organization that focuses on environmental and social corporate responsibility. As You Sow focuses on climate change, sustainability, human rights, and environmental health, and it engages, among others, companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Southern, FirstEnergy, Duke, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, HP, Dell, Apple, Proctor & Gamble, and Coca-Cola.

In 15 brief chapters, Behar takes readers through the basics. The first seven chapters include: shareholder responsibilities, how shareholders began to use their power with General Motors in South Africa, defining some limits on shareholder actions, explaining proxy votes, influencing fund managers, and corporate engagements and filing shareholder resolutions. Chapter 8 of The Shareholder Action Guide also tells the story of many campaigns in shareholder advocacy from across the past forty years. It profiles leaders in shareholder advocacy, including a testament to the work of SGI’s founder, the late Fr. Mike Crosby, for his efforts in tobacco. Those involved with SGI will recognize the names of numerous allies referenced in the book, including Tim Smith and Sr. Nora Nash, O.S.F. Subsequent chapters contemporary strategies in shareholder advocacy .

Behar explores how corporations are the most powerful entities on the planet. Sadly, many have had a long record of failing to care for creation, exploiting vulnerable people, and hiding boardroom decision-making. Since, by law, corporations are beholden to their shareholders, some philanthropic trusts, pension funds, and other institutional investors have used shareholder advocacy to press for changes in corporate policy. Behar also underscores the opportunity to engage individual investors, who have largely been silent, mistakenly thinking themselves powerless. The Shareholder Action Guide is designed to inform, inspire, and instruct investors in how to exercise their power to effect meaningful change on critical issues including environmental justice, food sustainability, executive compensation, and worker’s rights. Owners of as little as $2,000 worth of stock in a publicly traded corporation have the power to be heard. This book is a call to action designed to build a movement of active investors. Behar illustrates how investors can stop abdicating their power and act to make a better world.