Yahoo! Inc. should have sold to Microsoft Corp. Motorola Inc. is right to be splitting up. Blockbuster Inc. should buy Circuit City Stores Inc. And Exxon Mobil Corp. should appoint a non-executive chairman, adjust its views about the importance of fossil fuels in the next 50 years and invest more aggressively in developing alternatives.
All this strategic advice comes from activist investors. But the recommendations for Exxon Mobil come not from Carl Icahn but from a coalition of state treasury officials (California, Connecticut and Maryland),
proxy advisers (a new one, Proxy Governance Inc. has just weighed in) and, of course, members of the Rockefeller clan, who held a press conference last month on the subject.
So what we have is the same governance system being put to two nearly opposite uses. Financially speaking, Icahn is an immediate gratification kind of guy. Exxon Mobil's critics have a shareholder-value element to their argument too, but it's a long-term one, and in the short term, this is a company racking up profits of $40 billion a year. Exxon Mobil sees a return to $50 oil, as company exec Donald Humphreys explained in a
recent speech at Wharton. Its critics see a different future.
What happens when public policy issues knock up against corporate strategy? We'll find out more at Exxon Mobil's annual meeting on May 28. --
Kenneth KleeStrategic conundrum for big oil, and for the rest of us tooThe Rockefellers' investing ideas for Exxon Mobil
Join Corporate Dealmaker's LinkedIn forum
Juergen Lasowski
And the winners are...
