Joe Nocera, Columnist

I Gorged on Annual Meetings. There's a Better Way.

In-person corporate presentations are relics. (They don't even have free coffee.)

May 22, 2017 at 11:30 AM UTC

Corrected

May 30, 2017 at 10:28 PM UTC

Joe Nocera is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the host and writer of the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

The way it used to be.
Photographer: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

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For the last three or four years, ISS Analytics, a division of the influential proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services, has sent out a press release to mark the busiest day of annual meeting season. This year, it was Thursday, May 18; 128 companies met with shareholders that day, from Fortune 500 companies like Intel Corp. to penny stocks like Osprey Medical Inc., a kidney-care company.

I hadn’t been to an annual meeting in years, but back in the day I’d attended some classics. I was at the disastrous Home Depot Inc. meeting in 2006 where chief executive Bob Nardelli’s contemptuous treatment of shareholders probably cost him his job. In 2008, I saw several members of the Rockefeller family turn against Exxon Mobil, the fount of their wealth, by offering several global warming resolutions. And in 2009, I saw hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman shed actual tears at a Target Corp. annual meeting. (He’d just lost a proxy fight.)