Robert Ag Monks, a lawyer and businessman from a prominent Massachusetts family who unsuccessfully ran the US Senate three times, but found a call in his 40s as a defender of shareholders’ rights, died on April 29 at his home at Cape Elizabeth. He was 91 years old.
The reason was Pancreatic Cancer, who was diagnosed about a week before his death, said his son, Bobby.
Until the age of 40, Mr Monks had worked to work with the Goodwin Procter law firm in Boston, gathered a fortune that carried out a regional oil and coal operation and other businesses and made the first of three unsuccessful trips to the US Senator to Maine.
During the campaign during a Democratic Primary there in 1972, he observed “large, spots of industrial discharge” on a river, Mr. Monks wrote in an unpublished memoir. This and other signs of pollution made him wonder how corporate behavior could be better controlled. His answer was to persuade the shareholders to claim their property rights by pressing companies’ executives more responsibly to society in general. This epiphany, as he described it, eventually gave him the sense of purpose and direction he was looking for.
He watched the earlier of the US Department of Employment, where he was appointed in 1983 to oversee the pension system. And in 1985, Mr Monks, with Nell Minow, founded institutional shareholder or ISS services, which advises investors on how to vote on issues such as executives ‘elections, compensation policies and shareholders’ proposals.
The ISS, now owned by Deutsche Börse, Germany and an opposing company, Glass Lewis, is today the largest providers of such advisory services. Their influence is such that some corporate leaders and Republican politicians, accusing businesses of pursuing the agendas “awakened”, recently asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to strengthen them.
Mr Monks’ main objective was to concentrate power at the highest levels of corporate leadership. In 1991, he fought for a position on the Board of Directors of Sears, Robuck & Co., whose share price had sunk in the midst of a market share in more agile retailers. Among other things, he tried to limit the powers of Edward A. Brennan, who subsequently served both as president and as CEO of Sears.
Mr Monks lost in this endeavor, but continued to push for changes in the Sears strategy. In May 1992, he bought a full -page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, calling members of the Sears Board of Directors and frustrated them as “not available assets”.
Sears at that time seeks to differentiate, buy financial services such as the Dean Witter Reynolds Stock Exchange and discover credit card functions. But under the pressure of Mr Monks and other investors, Sears later decided that year to reject these businesses and focus on retail.
In 2003, Mr. Monks turned his attention to Exxon Mobil. During the annual meeting of company shareholders, he teaches Lee Raymond, president and chief executive. “The scope of your activities is global and transcends the usual language of business in politics and foreign policy,” Mr Monks said. “The field of your power, sir president is truly imperial. You are emperor.”
In addition to the launch of the ISS, Mr. Monks founded a small capital management company, wrote books and essays, gave speeches and formed coalitions with other corporate coalitions.
In part as a result of his efforts and those of alike activists, more companies divide the jobs of the President and the Managing Director. (Among the S&P 500 companies, 61 % now divides these roles, from 20 % in 2000, according to the ISS), much less councils are dominated by those involved and institutional investors tend to demand effective and moral governance, Mrs Minow, co -founder of ISS.
Mr Monks told the New York Times in 2007, “the idea that a company that creates a problem is getting rid of the effort to find a solution to this problem is like being an elephant in business, but no one is responsible for going behind the elephant and clean up after it.”
In one area, executive remuneration, he admitted that he could not change the behavior. Payment packages for Managing Directors continued to rise from levels that he considered “indecent” decades ago.
Using another animal transport, Mr Monks described the limits of shareholders’ power: “When two gorillas are getting ready to fight, they throw dust into each other.
Robert Augustus Gardner Monks was born in Boston on December 4, 1933 and spent his first years in what he described as a “ancient mansion” in the western city of Lenox in West Massachusetts. His ancestors, including Gardners and Peabodys, were rich for generations. Dividends by AT&T and General Electric kept the family comfortably through depression.
His father, George Gardner Monks, was a priest in the Episcopal Church and led the private school Lenox. His mother, Katherine (Knowles) monks, ran the household and helped oversee family qualities.
After graduating from St. Paul’s school in Concord, NH, Mr. Monks went to Harvard, winning a undergraduate diploma in history in 1954. He had stood out as a 6-foot-6 rower for the Varsity crew and was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key. He later ran to the University of Cambridge in England, where he also studied History as a Fiske scholar.
In 1954 he married Millicent Sprague, known as Milly, a descendant of the Carnegie Steel family. He later founded a dance company in Maine and wrote a memoir, “songs of three islands: a story of mental illness in a virtual American family”. He died in 2023.
In addition to his son, Mr. Monks survives a daughter, Melinda Monks. three grandchildren. and six big-gongs.
Mr Monks won his Harvard degree in 1958. At Goodwin Procter, his first post -school posture, he impressed his colleagues with his ability to find clients among his many family connections. At the age of 31, however, he was tired of law and let Goodwin take on various executive roles rejuvenation and in some cases sell family businesses.
A friend was hired as director of Boston Co., a concern for the management of capital, where he became president and a major shareholder – and was collected when the company was sold in 1981.
As a Republican candidate for the Senate, Mr Monks lost to Senator Margaret Chase Smith in 1972, to the Senator Edmund Muskie, Democrat, in the 1976 general elections and in Susan Collins, a Republican. His political talent was light. In his memoirs, however, he wrote that the campaign was a happy experience that brought him into contact with people of the working class who would never have met otherwise.
A 1999 biography by Hilary Rosenberg entitled “A traitor in his class”, a label that Mr Monks called the right one. A dedicated transcendent meditation, he enjoyed being a plutocrat and the needle -rich – a tendency that resulted in shrinking his social circle, he wrote.
Even so, he was careful not to exaggerate his heroism. “I’m more conservative than I like to think,” he told the Financial Times in 2005. “I’m talking a brave game, but I have a lot of money and never risking anything I can’t lose.”
