The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:30:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png So Long, Stockholder – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 So Long, Stockholder https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/03/08/so-long-stockholder/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=so-long-stockholder https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/03/08/so-long-stockholder/#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2018 14:17:06 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=105451?d=20230310124930EST Posted by Stephen Davis (Harvard Law School), on Thursday, March 8, 2018
Editor's Note:

Stephen Davis is a senior fellow in corporate governance at Harvard Law School and co-author of What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us and How to Fix It (Yale University Press, 2016).

As US companies put finishing touches on proxy statements for spring annual meetings, activist investors are set to challenge CEOs and corporate boards to generate more value, and quickly, or face the threat of ouster. Not even the biggest companies are immune to insurgency. So now might be a good time to reveal a simple, one-word “tell” anyone can use to test which US company might have a better chance of gliding unscathed through the season, and which might be a more likely target for attack. Scan the language a firm uses to refer to its investors in those forthcoming proxy statements. If it favors the term “stockholder” over “shareholder”, watch out.

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