Étiquette : C.A.

Quelques mythes persistants à propos de la culture de gouvernance


Vous trouverez, ci-dessous, un article tout à fait pertinent et intéressant, paru sur le site de INC.COM et publié par le .

Voici onze (11) affirmations, ou mythes, à propos de la culture organisationnel et comment les administrateurs de sociétés peuvent tirer profit de ces enseignements.

Bonne lecture !

« Culture is a manifestation of your company’s values, and it impacts everything from talent recruiting to innovation. Unfortunately, some founders and CEOs, especially at early-stage startups, confuse culture with perks or, worse, believe that defining a company’s culture is a task best left up to someone else. Eleven founders from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) call out the most persistent culture myths–and what you can do to overcome them »

11 Stubborn Myths About Company Culture

1. Perks = Culture

« Many startup founders mistakenly think that fun perks automatically make for a good culture. Don’t get me wrong–happy hours, Ping-Pong tables and catered lunches are great, but they’re not going to keep employees happy unless you work to create a fundamental culture of respect. It’s a lot easier to provide perks than it is to make sure that employees feel motivated and valued. » —Jared Feldman, Mashwork

2. Culture Doesn’t Start With You

« Most CEOs don’t realize that they are defining the culture by how they are behaving. Snap at people often? Anger will become part of your culture. Undermine your staff? Bureaucracy will invade your culture. Pretend everything is always amazing? You’ll create a culture full of fakes. If you want a culture that is always evolving and becoming more beautiful, invest in doing so yourself. » —Corey Blake, Round Table Companies

3. Employee Feedback Isn’t Important

« Some CEOs do not treat employee feedback as if it was as important as their own thoughts, because they are not viewed as equals. Though it is clear a CEO’s role is more expansive then other positions, the culture of a company can be negatively affected if people’s ideas and thoughts are suppressed. Each employee has a unique view of the organization, and the culture of sharing views is important to the company’s success. » —Phil Chen, Systems WatchIMG_00001932

4. Remote Work Doesn’t Impact Culture

« I’ve worked for several companies remotely for years, and none of them have worked out long term. You always have things going on, and you are never as productive as when you’re together in a group. Working with others next to you is the best way for your company culture to grow. If you have to work remotely, find a way to get to the office at least twice a week to improve culture. » —John Rampton, Adogy

5. Someone Else Owns It

« They assume it’s someone else’s problem to deal with. HR doesn’t own culture. Employees don’t own culture. Everyone owns culture, and senior leaders have an enormous impact on how business gets done in the day-to-day. CEOs who don’t understand this are destined to live with whatever they get. CEOs who do understand their roles are better equipped to be intentional about the culture they create in ways that drive performance. »–Chris Cancialosi, GothamCulture

6. Culture Doesn’t Need to Be Defined

« Chris Wood of Paige Technologies says it best, ‘Organizations are really only a representation of the people in them; employers must be diligent about mapping culture.’ Products and services can be duplicated, but people can’t. Your people drive your culture and they are the one defining difference of a company. CEOs forget to understand and define the culture that they have in place early on. » —Jason Grill, JGrill Media | Sock 101

7. Culture Is Just a Set of Values

« We help many growing companies build culture, and the one thing most CEOs get wrong is forgetting to operationalize it. Culture isn’t just a set of core values on the wall–it’s a set of consistent behaviors. You have to be clear what those values look like in practice (we call them work rules) so current and future employees see culture in action and understand how works gets done in the company and align the company to them. » —Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo

8. Culture Only Matters When You Reach X Size

« Most CEOs think they don’t have to worry about company culture until their business meets certain profit or growth margins. In reality, company culture is affecting your bottom line regardless of your margins. I’ll say it again: Your company’s culture is inextricable from your company’s success. Focus on hiring the right people and offering them a place to thrive. With the wrong staff or an unmotivated staff, your company will go nowhere. » —Sean Kelly, HUMAN

9. You Can’t Hire for Culture

« You have to carefully select the type of people you add to your team if you’re going for a particular culture. For instance, if you’re a fashion company, you probably want to hire people that are actually passionate about fashion. It’s good to have people with different ideas, but generally they should have a shared common interest. With that shared interest, you can build a culture that your team members and customers can get behind. » —Andy Karuza, Brandbuddee

10. Compensation Is the Only Motivator

« Once they reach a certain salary, most non-sales employees could honestly care less about additional compensation. Employees work to feel needed, so remind them that they are your company. Recognize them, and make it public recognition. » —Justin Gray, LeadMD

11. Culture Will Wait for You to Create It

« The interesting thing about a company culture is that it will create itself if you don’t create it first. CEOs need to define and personify the company culture and instill it at every level of the organization. The best companies all have a culture based on their mission, and all employees know why they’re working so hard. When the opposite is true, the culture will create itself–and it may not be the culture you envisioned. » —Andrew Thomas, SkyBell Technologies, Inc.

L’état des travaux de recherche relatifs à la contribution des investisseurs activistes


Ainsi que mon billet du 19 août en faisait état, le débat est de plus en plus vif en ce qui regarde la contribution des « Hedge Funds » à l’amélioration de la performance à long terme des entreprises ciblées.

Vous trouverez, ci-dessous, un court billet de Martin Lipton, partenaire fondateur de la firme Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, paru sur le site du Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, qui décrit la problématique et les principaux enjeux liés au comportement des investisseurs « activistes ».

L’auteur accorde une grande place aux travaux d’Yvan Allaire et de François Dauphin de l’IGOPP (Institut sur la Gouvernance d’Organisations Privées et Publiques) qui pourfendent l’approche économétrique de la recherche phare de Bebchuk-Brav-Jiang.

Le résumé ci-dessous relate les principaux jalons relatifs à cette saga !

The post puts forward criticism of an empirical study by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang on the long-term effects of hedge fund activism; this study is available here, and its results are summarized in a Forum post and in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article. As did an earlier post by Mr. Lipton available here, this post relies on the work of Yvan Allaire and François Dauphin that is available here. A reply by Professors Bebchuk, Brav, and Jiang to this earlier memo and to the Allaire-Dauphin work is available here. Additional posts discussing the Bebchuk-Brav-Jiang study, including additional critiques by Wachtell Lipton and responses to them by Professors Bebchuk, Brav, and Jiang, are available on the Forum here.

 

The Long-Term Consequences of Hedge Fund Activism

The experience of the overwhelming majority of corporate managers, and their advisors, is that attacks by activist hedge funds are followed by declines in long-term future performance. Indeed, activist hedge fund attacks, and the efforts to avoid becoming the target of an attack, result in increased leverage, decreased investment in CAPEX and R&D and employee layoffs and poor employee morale.IMG_00002145

Several law school professors who have long embraced shareholder-centric corporate governance are promoting a statistical study that they claim establishes that activist hedge fund attacks on corporations do not damage the future operating performance of the targets, but that this statistical study irrefutably establishes that on average the long-term operating performance of the targets is actually improved.

In two recent papers, Professor Yvan Allaire, Executive Chair of the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations, has demonstrated that the statistics these professors rely on to support their theories are not irrefutable and do not disprove the real world experience that activist hedge fund interventions are followed by declines in long-term operating performance. The papers by Professor Allaire speak for themselves:

“Activist” hedge funds: creators of lasting wealth? What do the empirical studies really say?

Hedge Fund Activism and their Long-Term Consequences; Unanswered Questions to Bebchuk, Brav and Jiang

Les « Hedge Funds » contribuent-ils à assurer la croissance à long terme des entreprises ciblées ?


Voici un article publié par IEDP (International Executive Development Programs) et paru sur le site http://www.iedp.com

Comme vous le constaterez, l’auteur fait l’éloge des effets positifs de l’activisme des actionnaires qui, contrairement à ce que plusieurs croient, ajoutent de la valeur aux organisations en opérant un assainissement de la gouvernance.

Je sais que les points de vue concernant cette forme d’activisme sont très partagés mais les auteurs clament que les prétentions des anti-activistes ne sont pas fondées scientifiquement.

En effet, les recherches montrent que les activités des « hedges funds » contribuent à améliorer la valeur ajoutée à long terme des entreprises ciblées.

La lecture de cet article vous donnera un bon résumé des positions en faveur de l’approche empirique. Votre idée est-elle faite à ce sujet ?

 

Do Hedge Funds Create Sustainable Company Growth ?

 

Hedge funds get a bad press but are they really a negative force? Looking at their public face, on the one hand we see so the called ‘vulture’ funds that this month forced Argentina into a $1.5bn default, on the other hand we recall that the UK’s largest private charitable donation, £466 million, was made by hedge fund wizard Chris Cooper-Hohn. Looking beyond the headlines the key question is, do hedge funds improve corporate performance and generate sustainable economic growth or not?

Researchers at Columbia Business School, Duke Fuqua School of Business and Harvard Law School looked at this most important question and discovered that despite much hype to the contrary  the long-term effect of hedge funds and ‘activists shareholders’ is largely positive. They tested the conventional wisdom that interventions by activist shareholders, and in particular activist hedge funds, have an adverse effect on the long-term interests of companies and their shareholders and found it was not supported by the data.

Their detractors have long argued that hedge funds force corporations to sacrifice long-term profits and competitiveness in order to reap quick short-term benefits. The immediate spike that comes after interventions from these activist shareholders, they argue, inevitably leads to long-term declines in operating performance and shareholder value.

Three researchers, Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School, Alon Brav of Duke Fuqua School of Business, and Wei Jiang of Columbia Business School argue that opponents of shareholder activism have no empirical basis for their assertions. In contrast, their own empirical research reveals that both short-term and long-term improvements in performance follow in the wake of shareholder interventions. Neither the company nor its long-term shareholders are adversely affected by hedge fund activism.

Their paper published in July 2013 reports on about 2,000 interventions by activist hedge funds during the period 1994-2007, examining a long time window of five years following the interventions. It found no evidence that interventions are followed by declines in operating performance in the long term. In fact, contrary to popular belief, activist interventions are followed by improved operating performance during the five-year period following these interventions. Furthermore the researchers discovered that improvements in long-term performance, were also evident when the intervention were in the two most controversial areas – first, interventions that lower or constrain long-term investments by enhancing leverage, beefing up shareholder pay-outs, or reducing investments and, second, adversarial interventions employing hostile tactics.

There was also no evidence that initial positive share price spikes accompanying activist interventions failed to appreciate their long-term costs and therefore tend to be followed by negative abnormal returns in the long term; the data is consistent with the initial spike reflecting correctly the intervention’s long-term consequences.

‘Pumping-and-dumping’ (i.e. when the exit of an activist is followed by long-term negative returns) is much sited by critics. But no evidence was found of this. Another complaint, that activist interventions during the years preceding the financial crisis rendered companies more vulnerable, was also debunked, as targeted companies were no more adversely affected by the crisis than others.

In light of the recent events in Argentina it is salutary to recall this important research. The positive aspect of activist hedge fund activity that it reveals should be born in mind when considering the ongoing policy debates on corporate governance, corporate law, and capital markets regulation. Business leaders, policy makers and institutional investors should reject the anti-hedge fund claims often used by detractors as a basis for limiting the rights and involvement of shareholders, and should support expanding rather than limiting the rights and involvement of shareholders. Boards and their executives should carefully monitor these debates in order to prepare for corporate governance’s evolving policy environment.

Reconsidération des indicateurs de mesure d’un « bon » conseil d’administration


Aujourd’hui, je vous propose la lecture d’un excellent article de Knud B. Jensen, paru dans le numéro Juillet-Août 2014, du Ivey Business Journal, section Governance.

L’auteur a fait une analyse attentive des études établissant une relation entre l’efficacité des « Boards » et les résultats financiers de l’entreprise. Sa conclusion ne surprendra pas les experts de la gouvernance car on sait depuis un certain temps que la plupart des études sont de nature analytique et que les relations étudiées sont associatives, donc de l’ordre des corrélations statistiques.

Mais, même les résultats dits scientifiques (empiriques), n’apportent pas une réponse claire aux relations causales entre l’efficacité des conseils d’administration et les résultats attendus, à court et long terme … Pourquoi ?

L’auteur suggère qu’un modèle de gouvernance ne peut être utilisé à toutes les sauces, parce que les organisations évoluent dans des contextes (certains diront univers) éminemment différents !

L’analyse fine de l’efficacité des C.A. montre que les variables contextuelles devraient avoir une place de choix dans l’évaluation de l’efficacité de la gouvernance.

La gouvernance est une discipline organisationnelle et son analyse devrait reposer sur les « théories organisationnelles, tels que le design, la culture, la personnalité et le leadership du PDG (CEO), ainsi que sur les compétences « contextuelles » des administrateurs ». C’est plus complexe et plus difficile que de faire des analyses statistiques … ce qui n’empêche pas de poursuivre dans la voie de la recherche scientifique.

Voici un extrait de cet article. Je vous invite cependant à le lire au complet afin de bien saisir toutes les nuances.

Bonne lecture ! Vos commentaires sont grandement appréciés.

Reconceptualizing the board and its metrics 

« The key to rating boards is understanding context. Most researchers and public policies assume a similar board system across industries. This assumption allows law makers and researchers to ignore inter-company board differences. Nevertheless, board functions and effectiveness must reflect the context in which an organization finds itself. After all, board processes and functions are clearly dependent on context (growth or the lack of it, competition, strategy or the lack of it, etc.). For example, after it became very clear that the functioning of the board of directors at Canadian Pacific was no longer suitable to drive company growth, an activist shareholder pushed for new directors and a reorganized board. This led to a dramatic increase in cost ratios, profit and share price. It changed the function of the board. Other illustrations where context called for a change of the board include BlackBerry (formerly RIM) and Barrick Gold….

When it comes to an effective governance model, one size does not fit all.  Context is paramount. Context is both endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous variables include complexity, asset base, competitive advantage, capital structure, quality of management, and board culture and leadership.  Exogenous variables include industry structures, position in growth cycle, competitive force, macroeconomics (interest rate, commodity pricing), world supply and growth, political changes, and unforeseen events (earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.). These variables are key inputs for company performance and determine whether earnings are above or below average. Simply put, companies may need a different type of board to fit with different sets of endogenous and exogenous variables.

Boards and management typically have different mandates, not to mention a different social architecture to carry them out. It is generally agreed that the CEO and the management teams run the firm, while the board approves strategy, selects the CEO and determines the incentives, sets risk management, and approves major investments and changes to the capital structure.  But as discussed in Boards that Lead (2014) by Ram Charan, Dennis Casey and Michael Useen, directors must also lead the corporation on the most crucial issues. As a result, the ideal level of board involvement remains a grey area and is rarely defined. Setting boundaries when there are overlapping responsibilities is difficult. Nevertheless, how the functional relationships between the board and management work is probably far more important than board features to the growth, and sometimes survival, of the organization.

In Back to the Drawing Board (2004), Colin Carter and Jay Lorsch suggest the reason so little has resulted from the various reforms aimed at improving governance is the focus on visible variables, or what others have labeled structural issues, instead of a focus on process or inside board behavior. In other words, features have trumped functions.

The increase in complexity may be another issue. Keep in mind that directors don’t spend a lot of time together, which is a barrier to good behavior and process and makes it difficult for boards to function as a dynamic team. According to a 2013 McKinsey survey of over 700 corporate board members, directors spend an average of 22 days per year on company issues and two thirds do not think they have a complete understanding of the firm’s strategy. Clearly, there are severe limitations on boards, which have more to do than time available, especially with their limited number of board meetings packed with presentations from management.

Boards should be viewed as an organizational system, with context part of any performance judgment. This view has more merit in distinguishing between effective and ineffective boards than the structural view. Human resource metrics may hold more promise and be more important than the structural indices currently used to distinguish between effective and ineffective boards. »

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Pour une supervision efficace de la fonction audit interne | PwC


Vous trouverez ci-dessous un document de référence publié par PwC et paru dans la série Audit Committee Excellence. Ce document, partagé par Denis Lefort, CPA, CIA, CRMA, expert-conseil en Gouvernance, audit et contrôle, apporte des réponses très complètes à plusieurs questions que les membres de conseils d’administration se posent eu égard au rôle de la fonction audit interne dans l’organisation.

1. Pourquoi la surveillance de l’audit interne est-elle critique pour les comités d’audit ?

2. Quel est le rôle des administrateurs dans l’optimisation des activités de l’audit interne ?

3. Comment aider l’audit interne à mieux définir sa mission ?

4. Quelles sont les lignes d’autorité et les besoins en ressources de cette activité ?

5. Quel est le processus de révision des résultats de l’audit interne ?

6. Que faire si votre entreprise ne possède pas une fonction d’audit interne ?

Ce document sera donc très utile à tout administrateur soucieux de parfaire ses connaissances sur le rôle très important qu’un service d’audit interne peut jouer.

Voici une introduction au rapport de PwC . Bonne lecture ! Vos commentaires sont les bienvenus.

 

Effective oversight of the internal audit function | PwC

 

The audit committee’s role is not getting any easier, but an audit committee has a lot of resources in its arsenal to help meet today’s high expectations. One of these tools is the internal audit function. Directors can, and should, focus on maximizing the value proposition of this group to ensure their own success.

 

A lot goes on in companies — and a lot can go wrong, even when you have good people and thoughtfully designed processes. That’s why so many audit committees look to internal audit as their eyes and ears — a way to check whether things are working as they should. Some companies staff the function internally, while others choose to outsource some or all of the role. Some do not have an internal audit function at all.

IMG00286-20100629-2027_2

 

For many audit committees, overseeing internal audit isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s a requirement. At NYSE companies, audit committees have to oversee internal audit’s performance and periodically meet in private sessions. NASDAQ is currently considering whether to require its listed companies to have an internal audit function and what role audit committees should play.

 

Whether a required function or not, we believe it’s critical that audit committees focus on internal audit. Why? PwC’s 2014 State of the internal audit profession study found that about one-third of board members believe internal audit adds less than significant value to the company, and only 64% of directors believe internal audit is performing well at delivering expectations. Even Chief Audit Executives (CAEs) are critical of their functions’ performance, with just two-thirds saying it’s performing well.

La sauvegarde des grands principes de gouvernance | Le mirage du changement !


Voici un article qui présente la conduite des actionnaires activistes comme relativement symbolique, c’est-à-dire exempte de véritables enjeux critiques, paru récemment sur le blogue du Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.

Les auteurs Marcel Kahan et Edward Rock, professeurs de droit des affaires à l’Université de Pennsylvanie, ont observé que l’ensemble des positions des différents acteurs (actionnaires, activistes, administrateurs, dirigeants …) renforcent les grands principes de la gouvernance corporative en limitant les effets trop drastiques de leurs actions, tout en préservant l’intérêt des principaux protagonistes.

Les revendications des activistes, du point de vue de la gouvernance, sont largement symboliques et ont pour résultats la préservation de la primauté d’une « gouvernance orientée vers les intérêts des actionnaires », une gouvernance qui met l’accent sur les besoins des actionnaires.

La synthèse de l’article est présentée clairement au dernier paragraphe du texte ci-dessous. Quel est votre opinion à ce sujet ?

Croyez-vous que les manœuvres des activistes et des dirigeants donnent lieu à peu de changements significatifs et que celles-ci consistent surtout à renforcer le point de vue d’une gouvernance centrée sur le pouvoir des actionnaires plutôt que sur le pouvoir du conseil d’administration ?

Bonne lecture ! Vos commentaires sont appréciés.

Symbolic Corporate Governance Politics

 

« Corporate governance politics display a peculiar feature: while the rhetoric is often heated, the material stakes are often low. Consider, for example, shareholder resolutions requesting boards to redeem poison pills. Anti-pill resolutions were the most common type of shareholder proposal from 1987–2004, received significant shareholder support, and led many companies to dismantle their pills. Yet, because pills can be reinstated at any time, dismantling a pill has no impact on a company’s ability to resist a hostile bid. Although shareholder activists may claim that these proposals vindicate shareholder power against entrenched managers, we are struck by the fact that these same activists have not made any serious efforts to impose effective constraints on boards, for example, by pushing for restrictions on the use of pills in the certificate of incorporation. Other contested governance issues, such as proxy access and majority voting, exhibit a similar pattern: much ado about largely symbolic change.

What accounts for this persistent gap between rhetoric and reality? In our article, Symbolic Corporate Governance Politics, we consider several explanations drawn from “public interest” and “public choice” perspectives. Ultimately, we conclude that Thurman Arnold’s “symbolic” view of politics, developed in his magnum opus, The Folklore of Capitalism, complements these explanations to provide a fuller understanding.

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From a “public interest” perspective, the pursuit by shareholder activists of reforms with minimal direct impact can be rationalized in a number of ways. For one, the cost of such activism is low, both in relation to the value of public companies and in relation to the portfolio on institutional investors. Moreover, even largely symbolic reforms can have a larger indirect impact: they may educate investors, directors, and managers about the importance of shareholder-centric governance; they may serve as show of strength of shareholder power and thereby lead directors, managers, and policy makes to pay more attention to shareholder interests; or they may be a first step in a longer battle for more meaningful reform.

From a “public choice” perspective, shareholder activists may pursue activism for its own sake, to keep themselves busy (and employed). And even if the stakes are low, pro-management forces may oppose meaningless changes to prove loyalty to their clients and generate business.

These explanations, however, leave several questions unanswered: Why the heated rhetoric? What explains the selection of the largely symbolic issues that are being pursued? If these issues are (wrongly) depicted as important, won’t their pursuit divert energy from other issues that are more consequential?

Thurman Arnold’s theory of the role of symbols, myth, and folklore can provide some answers. As a society, Arnold would argue, we need to believe that managers are held accountable even—and especially—in the largest corporations. It is only because “shareholders” exercise ultimate control over managers that it is acceptable that a small group of managers control huge concentrations of capital and get paid princely sums for doing so. This creates a tension. On the one hand, individual shareholders do not, in fact, play that role. On the other hand, large concentrations of capital are necessary for many businesses operating in world product and capital markets. It thus becomes necessary to develop a procedure for reconciling the ideal with practical reality by constantly attacking “the separation of ownership and control” on rational legal and economic ground, while at the same time never really interfering with it. The battles over shareholder power fulfill this function.

But to serve the ceremonial function of asserting shareholder control, shareholder activists must pick issues where the chances of success are reasonably high. Symbolic activism thus serves everyone’s interests. For shareholder activists, who lack strong monetary incentives that directly reward them for increasing share values, symbolic affirmations of shareholder power has allure and is likely to be supported by other shareholders. For managerialists, losing is acceptable and actual (as opposed to rhetorical) resistance is not too high. Activism keeps the activists busy. Plausible arguments for shareholder benefit, combined with low potential costs, assure little internal opposition.

Our analysis has several implications for governance debates. First, the rhetoric used by activists on all sides should be taken with a large pinch of salt: most issues described as momentous generally are not. Second, one should be aware that symbolic battles may divert attention (for better or for worse) from more meaningful reform. Third, shareholder activists and managers and their defenders all have more complex motivations than maximizing firm value or protecting privileges. Rather than epic battles between the forces of good and evil, governance debates typically involve disputes between different shades of grey. Finally, looking out through Thurman Arnold’s eyes, one may observe all the battles and conclude that we live, if not in the best of all possible worlds, then at least in a pretty good one. Despite the back and forth, corporate governance in the U.S. is characterized by a high degree of stability and slow paced, gradual change. Because we ritually affirm the principle of shareholder control—maintained by the symbolic, and largely harmless, disputes we have discussed in this article—the current system of corporate governance enjoys widespread support. Shareholder activism, rather than undermining the legitimacy of the current system, serves an important, legitimating function by showing that shareholders have power and that reform for the better is possible ».

The full paper is available for download here.

 

Le C.A. doit clarifier les rôles de chef de la conformité (CCO) et de chef des affaires juridiques (General Counsel)


On note une ambigüité de rôle croissante entre les fonctions de chef de la conformité (CCO) et de chef du contentieux (General Counsel).  Cet article de Michael W. Peregrine, associé de la firme McDermott Will & Emery vise à souligner les responsabilités réciproques de chaque poste ainsi qu’à montrer que celles-ci ont intérêt à être mieux définies afin d’éviter les risques de conflits associés à leur exécution.

L’auteur suggère que le rôle de chef de la conformité prend une place de plus en plus prépondérante dans la structure des organisations, en vertu du caractère « d’indépendance » rattaché à cette fonction. Les deux postes doivent donc être dissociés, le chef du contentieux se rapportant au PDG et le chef de la conformité se rapportant au conseil d’administration !

L’article insiste sur une meilleure description de ces deux postes et sur le rôle que doit jouer le conseil d’administration à cet égard.

Je vous invite à lire ce court article paru sur le blogue du Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance afin de mieux connaître la nature des arguments invoqués. Bonne lecture !

Compliance or Legal? The Board’s Duty to Assure Clarity

Key Developments

Government Positions. The first, and perhaps most pronounced, of these developments has been efforts of the federal government to encourage (and, in some cases, to require) that the positions of compliance officer and general counsel be separate organizational positions held by separate officers; that the compliance officer not report to the general counsel; and that the compliance officer have a direct reporting relationship to the governing board.

There also appears to be a clear trend—while certainly not universal—among many corporations to follow the government’s lead and adopt the “separate relationship” structure, for a variety of valid and appropriate reasons. Yet, the focus on compliance officer “independence” obscures the need for compliance programs to have leadership from, coordination of or other connection to, the general counsel.P1030083

Another concern arises from the (dubious) perspective that the compliance officer should not have a reporting relationship to the general counsel. One of the underlying premises here is that the general counsel somehow has at least a potential, if not actual, conflict of interest with respect to advice that the compliance officer may provide to management or the board. However, this perspective ignores critical professional responsibility obligations of the general counsel (e.g., Rules 1.6, 1.7 and 1.13).

The third, and potentially most significant of these potential concerns relates to the preservation of the attorney-client privilege when the chief compliance officer is not the general counsel. In a recent published article, a leading corporate lawyer argues persuasively that the forced separation of the compliance and legal functions jeopardizes the ability to preserve the privilege in connection with corporate compliance based investigations.

Corporate Guardian. A second, and more subtle, development has been a series of public comments by compliance industry thought leaders suggesting that the role of “guardian of the corporate reputation” is exclusively reserved for the corporate compliance officer; that the compliance officer is the organizational “subject matter expert” for ethics and culture, as well as compliance. This “jurisdictional claim” appears to be premised on the questionable perspective that “lawyers tell you whether you can do something, and compliance tells you whether you should”.

This perspective ignores the extent to which the general counsel is specifically empowered to provide such advice by virtue of the rules of professional responsibility; principally Rule 2.1 (“Advisor”). It is also contrary to long standing public discourse that frames the lawyer’s role as a primary guardian of the organizational reputation. For example, the estimable Ben Heineman, Jr. has described the role of the general counsel as the “lawyer-statesman”, the essence of which is the responsibility to “move beyond the first question—‘is it legal?’—to the ultimate question—‘is it right?’”

Job Descriptions. The third significant development is efforts by compliance industry commentators to extend the portfolio of the CCO, to a point where it appears to conflict with the expanding role of the general counsel. As one prominent compliance authority states, “The CCO mandate is ambitious, broad, and complex; no less than to oversee the organization’s ability to ‘prevent and detect misconduct’”.

This point of view is being used to justify greater compliance officer involvement in matters such as internal investigations, corporate governance, conflict of interest resolution, the development of codes of ethics, and similar areas of organizational administration.

The debate over roles and responsibilities is exacerbated by the extent to which the term “compliance” continuously appears in the public milieu in the form of “shorthand”. In this way, the term appears to reference some sort of broad organizational commitment to adherence with applicable law; i.e., more as a state of corporate consciousness than as an executive-level job description. To the extent that “compliance” is used loosely in the business and governance media, it serves to confuse corporate leadership about the real distinctions between accepted legal and compliance components.

Expansive definitions of the compliance function are also at odds with new surveys that depict the expanding organizational prominence of the general counsel. These new surveys lend empirical support to the view that the general counsel of a sophisticated enterprise (such as a health care system) has highly consequential responsibilities, and thus should occupy a position of hierarchical importance within the organization.

The Board’s Role

As developments cause the roles and responsibilities of the compliance officer and the general counsel to become increasingly blurred, the board has an obligation to establish clarity and reduce the potential for organizational risk. The failure to clearly delineate the respective duties of these key corporate officers can create administrative waste and inefficiency; increase internal confusion and tension; jeopardize application of the attorney-client privilege, and “draw false distinctions between organizational and legal risk”.

An effective board response would certainly include directing the compliance officer and general counsel, with the support of the CEO and outside advisors, to prepare for board consideration a set of mutually acceptable job descriptions for their respective positions. This would include a confirmation of the board reporting rights of both officers. It would also include the preparation of a detailed communication protocol that would address important GC/CCO coordination issues.

The perceptive board may also wish to explore, with the support of external advisors, the very sensitive core issues associated with compliance officer independence, and with the hierarchical position of the compliance officer; i.e., should that position be placed in the corporate hierarchy on an equal footing with the corporate legal function, or in some subordinate or other supporting role.

The board can and should be assertive in adopting measures that support the presence of a vibrant, effective compliance program that teams productively with the general counsel.

 

L’évaluation des conseils d’administration et des administrateurs | Sept étapes à considérer


Cet article rédigé par Geoffrey KIEL, James BECK et Jacques GRISÉ (1) et paru dans les Documents de travail de la Faculté des sciences de l’administration en 2008 est toujours d’actualité. Il présente un guide pratique des questions clés que les conseils d’administration doivent prendre en considération lorsqu’ils planifient une évaluation.

On met l’accent sur l’utilité d’avoir des évaluations bien menées ainsi que sur les sept étapes à suivre pour des évaluations efficaces d’un conseil d’administration et des administrateurs. Bonne lecture.

SEPT ÉTAPES À SUIVRE POUR DES ÉVALUATIONS EFFICACES D’UN CONSEIL D’ADMINISTRATION ET DES ADMINISTRATEURS

 

Lorsqu’une crise se produit au sein d’une société, comme celles qu’ont connues Nortel et Hollinger International, les intervenants, les médias, les organismes de réglementation et la collectivité se tournent vers le conseil d’administration pour trouver des réponses. Étant donné que ce dernier est le chef décisionnel ultime de la société, il est responsable des actions et du rendement de la société.

Le défi actuel que doivent relever les conseils d’administration consiste à accroître la valeur des organisations qu’ils gouvernent. Grâce à l’évaluation du rendement, les conseils d’administration peuvent s’assurer qu’ils ont les connaissances, les compétences et la capacité de relever ce défi.

Plusieurs guides et normes de pratiques exemplaires reconnaissent cette notion. Ainsi, la Commission des valeurs mobilières de l’Ontario indique dans les lignes directrices sur la gouvernance des sociétés (NP 58-201) que « le conseil d’administration, ses comités et chacun de ses administrateurs devraient faire l’objet régulièrement d’une évaluation à l’égard de leur efficacité et de leur contribution ».

L’évaluation du conseil d’administration est trop souvent perçue comme un mal nécessaire – un processus mécanique consistant à cocher des points sur une liste qui, en bout de ligne, a peu de valeur réelle pour le conseil d’administration si ce n’est pour satisfaire aux exigences en matière de conformité. Toutefois… un processus efficace d’évaluation du conseil d’administration peut donner lieu à une transformation.

Une publication du Collège des administrateurs de sociétés (CAS), sous forme de questions et réponses sur la gouvernance, a été conçue à l’intention des administrateurs nommés par le gouvernement du Québec comme membre d’un conseil d’administration d’une société d’État ou d’un organisme gouvernemental. Celle-ci vise à répondre aux questions les plus courantes qu’un administrateur nouvellement nommé peut légitimement se poser en matière de gouvernance. On y indique qu’ « une évaluation faite à intervalles périodiques est essentielle pour assurer le maintien d’une gouvernance efficace » (2).

Penguins

Cet article offrira une approche pratique en matière d’évaluations efficaces des conseils d’administration et des administrateurs en appliquant un cadre comportant sept étapes qui pose les questions clés que tous les conseils d’administration devraient prendre en considération lorsqu’ils planifient une évaluation. Même les conseils d’administration efficaces peuvent tirer profit d’une évaluation bien menée.

Comme nous l’avons résumé dans le tableau 1, une évaluation menée adéquatement peut contribuer considérablement à des améliorations du rendement à trois niveaux : organisation, conseil d’administration et administrateur. Selon Lawler et Finegold « les conseils qui évaluent leurs membres et qui s’évaluent ont tendance à être plus efficaces que ceux qui ne le font pas ». Toutefois, il faut souligner que ces avantages ne sont possibles qu’au moyen d’une évaluation du conseil d’administration menée de manière appropriée; si l’évaluation n’est pas faite correctement, cela peut causer de la méfiance parmi les membres du conseil d’administration et entre le conseil lui-même et la direction.

Une publication de l’École d’administration publique du Québec (ENAP), produite en collaboration avec le Collège des administrateurs de sociétés (CAS), présente une section traitant de l’évaluation de la performance du conseil d’administration (3).

Selon les auteurs, « L’évaluation est une composante essentielle d’une saine gouvernance d’entreprise. Elle permet de jeter un regard sur la façon dont les décisions ont été prises et sur la manière d’exercer la gestion des activités de l’organisation et ce, dans une perspective d’amélioration continue… Il incombe au président du conseil d’instaurer une culture d’évaluation du rendement et de la performance. Pour ce faire, il doit veiller à la mise en place d’un processus d’évaluation clair, à l’élaboration de règles et d’outils pertinents, à la définition des responsabilités de chaque intervenant dans le processus d’évaluation, à la diffusion de l’information et à la mise en place des correctifs nécessaires ». Dans cette publication, on présente dix outils détaillés d’évaluations (questionnaires) qui concernent les groupes cibles suivants :

1. l’évaluation du conseil

2. l’évaluation du fonctionnement du conseil

3. l’évaluation du président du conseil

4. l’évaluation d’un membre de conseil

5. l’évaluation du comité de gouvernance et d’éthique

6. l’évaluation du comité de vérification

7. l’évaluation du comité des ressources humaines

8. l’évaluation du fonctionnement d’un comité

9. l’évaluation d’un membre de comité

10. l’évaluation du président d’un comité

_______________________________________

(1) Geoffrey Kiel, Ph.D., premier vice-chancelier délégué et doyen de l’École d’administration, University of Notre Dame, Australie, et président de la société Effective Governance Pty Ltd, James Beck, directeur général, Effective Governance Pty Ltd, Jacques Grisé, Ph.D., F.Adm.A., collaborateur spécial du Collège des administrateurs de sociétés (CAS), Faculté des sciences de l’administration, Université Laval, Québec.

(2) Collège des administrateurs de sociétés, Être un administrateur de sociétés d’état : 16 questions et réponses sur la gouvernance, Faculté des sciences de l’administration, Université Laval, 2007.

(3) ENAP, Les devoirs et responsabilités d’un conseil d’administration, Guide de référence, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, 2007.

Le mentorat | Une démarche précieuse pour préparer la relève


Debra Wheatman* a publié un billet intéressant dans CEO.com qui fait l’éloge du mentorat en vue de mieux réussir le processus de préparation de la relève du président et chef de direction (PCD, CEO).

Une firme de recrutement au niveau mondial, InterSearch Worldwide, a montré que seulement 45 % des organisations avait un processus de planification de la succession du premier dirigeant !

L’auteure propose de mettre en place un plan de mentorat à l’échelle de toute l’organisation et elle expose les avantages pressentis d’une telle démarche.

Pour elle le mentorat est bénéfique pour le raffermissement de la culture, la croissance et la viabilité de l’organisation. Voici un extrait de ce court article. Bonne lecture !

 

Getting A CEO Succession Right

 

Mentoring Provides a Foundation for Positive Performance

Given the dynamic and changing business environment in which we all work, there are many instances in which people with little to no experience are required to assume new responsibilities and adapt to rapidly changing business situations. Oftentimes, these people are asked to do things that are unfamiliar and represent unchartered territory.

Pairing these individuals with senior executives with the expertise and organizational knowledge can help more inexperienced staff develop the skills and expertise to be effective and grow within the organization. By working with a mentor, a mentee will be able to develop a positive work approach and be motivated to assume increasing responsibility, with the resulting impact being strong job performance, productivity and confidence.

Mentoring Supports a Culture of Learning and Knowledge Transfer

The ongoing health and wellness of any organization is largely predicated on ensuring employees are equipped to add continuous value. Providing staff with the means to acquire the knowledge and skills to be effective supports short- and long-term goals for learning and sets the tone for organization-wide knowledge distribution. By encouraging knowledge transfer efforts, the foundation of learning is established.IMG_20140515_143618

Mentoring programs also serve to empower employees, promoting a culture of inclusivity where people are encouraged to communicate, fostering productivity and a focus on achieving corporate goals.

Mentoring is Key for Developing Future Leaders

One of the key benefits of a robust mentoring program is that it helps to provide a solid training ground for future leaders. One of the things that employees desire when they join an organization is to have an understanding of opportunities for upward mobility and growth.

With a well-developed mentoring program, employees can review their career goals and pursue advancement opportunities. The partnerships established from the program helps employees understand what they need to do to progress within the organization. The assistance from a mentor can help propel employees forward, providing a strong foundation of commitment and drive for success.

Mentoring Leads to Increased Employee Retention

Mentoring increases employee retention because it sends a positive message that the organization cares about employees’ development into leadership roles. One of the things that can sometimes hinder growth is an employee’s inability to understand or embrace an organization’s corporate culture. With an active mentoring program, mentees are given the opportunity to navigate such intangibles, thereby increasing opportunities for long-term success.

Mentoring Increases Self-Awareness

One of the things that help people grow into effective leaders is the understanding of their own strengths and shortcomings. This can be a hard thing for a person to identify on his or her own. In a mentoring relationship, the mentee will be given feedback by the mentor as a means to conducting a thoughtful self-evaluation. Though it might be difficult, self-awareness is critical to understanding areas for improvement and is the first step in making meaningful changes that can positively impact career outcomes.

Mentoring Is a Great Idea Even If You Aren’t Going Anywhere Anytime Soon

Mentoring provides significant benefits both to you and your successor. As a teacher, you will have the opportunity to revisit past decisions, plans and re-assess the company’s goals and objectives. As your mentee asks tough questions about why things are the way they are, it will give you the chance to look at the past, present and future through a set of fresh eyes. Even if you don’t plan on going anywhere soon, mentoring and building your succession plan can dramatically improve the performance of you, your team and your organization.

______________________________________________

* Career and personal branding expert Debra Wheatman is president and owner of Careers Done Write. She is globally recognized as an expert in advanced career search techniques, with more than 18 years’ corporate human resource experience helping clients make gratifying career choices.

Ce que chaque administrateur de sociétés devrait savoir à propos de la sécurité infonuagique


Cet article est basé sur un rapport de recherche de Paul A. Ferrillo, avocat conseil chez Weil, Gotshal & Manges, et de Dave Burg et Aaron Philipp de PricewaterhouseCoopers. Les auteurs présentent une conceptualisation des facteurs infonuagiques (cloud computing) qui influencent les entreprises, en particulier les comportements de leurs administrateurs.

L’article donne une définition du phénomène infonuagique et montre comment les conseils d’administration sont interpellés par les risques que peuvent constituer les cyber-attaques. En fait, la partie la plus intéressante de l’article consiste à mieux comprendre, ce que les auteurs appellent, la « Gouvernance infonuagique » (Cloud Cyber Governance).

L’article propose plusieurs questions critiques que les administrateurs doivent adresser à la direction de l’entreprise. Vous trouverez, ci-dessous, les points saillants de cet article lequel devrait intéresser les administrateurs préoccupés par les aspects de sécurité des opérations infonuagiques. Bonne lecture !

 

Cloud Cyber Security: What Every Director Needs to Know

« There are four competing business propositions affecting most American businesses today. Think of them as four freight trains on different tracks headed for a four-way stop signal at fiber optic speed.

First, with a significant potential for cost savings, American business has adopted cloud computing as an efficient and effective way to manage countless bytes of data from remote locations at costs that would be unheard of if they were forced to store their data on hard servers. According to one report, “In September 2013, International Data Corporation predicted that, between 2013 and 2017, spending on pubic IT cloud computing will experience a compound annual growth of 23.5%.” Another report noted, “By 2014, cloud computing is expected to become a $150 billion industry. And for good reason—whether users are on a desktop computer or mobile device, the cloud provides instant access to data anytime, anywhere there is an Internet connection.”

IMG_20140219_205959

The second freight train is data security. Making your enterprise’s information easier for you to access and analyze also potentially makes it easier for others to do, too. 2013 and 2014 have been the years of “the big data breach,” with millions of personal data and information records stolen by hackers. Respondents to the 2014 Global State of Information Security® Survey reported a 25% increase in detected security incidents over 2012 and a 45% increase compared to 2011. Though larger breaches at global retailers are extremely well known, what is less known is that cloud providers are not immune from attack. Witness the cyber breach against a file sharing cloud provider that was perpetrated by lax password security and which caused a spam attack on its customers. “The message is that cyber criminals, just like legitimate companies, are seeing the ‘business benefits’ of cloud services. Thus, they’re signing up for accounts and reaching sensitive files through these accounts. For the cyber criminals this only takes a run-of-the-mill knowledge level … This is the next step in a new trend … and it will only continue.”

The third freight train is the plaintiff’s litigation bar. Following cyber breach after cyber breach, they are viewing the corporate horizon as rich with opportunities to sue previously unsuspecting companies caught in the middle of a cyber disaster, with no clear way out. They see companies scrambling to contend with major breaches, investor relation delays, and loss of brand and reputation.

The last freight train running towards the intersection of cloud computing and data security is the topic of cyber governance—i.e., what directors should be doing or thinking about to protect their firm’s most critical and valuable IP assets. In our previous article, we noted that though directors are not supposed to be able to predict all potential issues when it comes to cyber security issues, they do have a basic fiduciary duty to oversee the risk management of the enterprise, which includes securing its intellectual property and trade secrets. The purpose of this article is to help directors and officers potentially avoid a freight train collision by helping the “cyber governance train” control the path and destiny of the company. We will discuss basic cloud security principles, and basic questions directors should ask when considering whether or not the data their management desires to run on a cloud-based architecture will be as safe from attack as possible. As usual when dealing with cyber security issues, there are no 100% foolproof answers. Even cloud experts disagree on cloud-based data security practices and their effectiveness] There are only good questions a board can ask to make sure it is fulfilling its duties to shareholders to protect the company’s valuable IP assets.

What is Cloud Computing/What Are Its Basic Platforms

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services). Cloud computing is a disruptive technology that has the potential to enhance collaboration, agility, scaling, and availability, and provides the opportunities for cost reduction through optimized and efficient computing. The cloud model envisages a world where components can be rapidly orchestrated, provisioned, implemented and decommissioned, and scaled up or down to provide an on-demand utility-like model of allocation and consumption.”

Cloud computing is generally based upon three separate and distinct architectures that matter when considering the security of the data sitting in the particular cloud environment.

……

Cloud Cyber Governance

As shown above, what is commonly referred to as the cloud actually can mean many different things depending on the context and use. Using SaaS to manage a customer base has a vastly different set of governance criteria to using IaaS as a development environment. As such, there are very few accepted standards for properly monitoring/administering a cloud-based environment. There are many IT consultants in the cloud-based computing environment that can be consulted in that regard. Our view, however, is that directors are ultimately responsible for enterprise risk management, and that includes cyber security, a subset of which is cloud-based cyber-security. Thus it is important for directors to have a basic understanding of the risks involved in cloud-based data storage systems, and with cloud-based storage providers. Below are a few basic questions that come to mind that a director could pose to management, and the company’s CISO and CIO:

1. Where will your data be stored geographically (which may determine which laws apply to the protection of the company’s data), and in what data centers?

2. Is there any type of customer data co-mingling that could potentially expose the company data to competitors or other parties?

3. What sort of encryption does the cloud-based provider use?

4. What is the vendor’s backup and disaster recovery plan?

5. What is the vendor’s incident response and notification plan?

6. What kind of access will you have to security information on your data stored in the cloud in the event the company needs to respond to a regulatory request or internal investigation?

7. How transparent is the cloud provider’s own security posture? What sort of access can your company get to the cloud provider’s data center and personnel to make sure it is receiving what it is paying for?

8. What is the cloud servicer’s responsibility to update its security systems as technology and sophistication evolves?

9. What is the cloud provider’s ability to timely detect (i.e., continuously monitor) and respond to a security incident, and what sort of logging information is kept in order to potentially detect anomalous activity?

10. Are there any third party requirements (such as HITECH/HIPAA) that the provider needs to conform to for your industry?

11. Is the cloud service provider that is being considered already approved under the government’s FedRamp authorization process, which pre-approves cloud service providers and their security controls?

12. Finally, does the company’s cyber insurance liability policy cover cloud-based Losses assuming there is a breach and customer records are stolen or otherwise compromised?  This is a very important question to ask, especially if the company involved is going to use a cyber-insurance policy as a risk transfer mechanism. When in doubt, a knowledgeable cyber-insurance broker should be consulted to make sure cloud-based Losses are covered.

High-profile breaches have proven conclusively that cybersecurity is a board issue first and foremost. Being a board member is tough work. Board members have a lot on their plate, including, first and foremost, financial reporting issues. But as high-profile breaches have shown, major cyber breaches have almost the same effect as a high profile accounting problem or restatement. They cause havoc with investors, stock prices, vendors, branding, corporate reputation and consumers. Directors should be ready to ask tough questions regarding cyber security and cloud-based security issues so they do not find themselves on the wrong end of a major data breach, either on the ground or in the cloud. »

Que faire quand la confiance entre le conseil et la direction est faible ? | Le cas d’une OBNL


Voici un cas qui origine du blogue australien de Julie Garland McLellan et qui intéressera certainement tous les membres de conseils d’administration d’OBNL.  J’ai choisi de partager ce cas en gouvernance avec vous car je crois que celui-ci évoque trop souvent les situations vécues par certaines organisations à but non lucratif.

Ce cas présente la situation réelle d’une entreprise dont les liens de confiance entre le C.A. et la direction se sont effrités.

Qu’en pensez-vous ? Que feriez-vous à la place de Jake ? Quelle analyse vous semble la plus appropriée dans notre contexte ? Que pensez-vous des analyses effectuées par les trois experts ?

« Boards operate best when each director trusts each other director to adhere to the jointly accepted governance processes and policies as well as the relevant laws and regulations. This month our real life case study considers what to do when that trust is lost. Consider: What would you advise a friend to do under these circumstances ? »

 

Que faire quand la confiance est perdue ?

 

« Jake is a club chairman. The former chairman resigned after a major disagreement with the rest of the board which arose because the former chairman signed a major contract. When the board discovered what had happened they were furious that a large decision had been made without involving them. The former chairman stormed from the meeting and resigned in writing the following morning.

The Board then acted without a formal chair, directors took turns to chair the meetings, until the next election. During this time the board rewrote the by-laws which previously allowed the chairman to sign contracts after verification by the treasurer that doing so would not lead to insolvency. They adopted new by-laws that stated no director, including – for absence of doubt – the chairman and/or treasurer, could commit the club to any contract, expenditure or course of action unless approved in a duly constituted board meeting.P1110362

Jake was not previously on the board and was elected unopposed after being invited by the treasurer to stand for election. He is a successful businessman but has no experience with consensual board decision-making. He has now discovered that the club is wallowing because recent decisions have not been made in a timely fashion. His fellow directors are numerous, factionated and indecisive. The CEO has low delegations and the constitution envisages that the chairman, CEO and treasurer should make decisions between meetings and use the board to ratify strategy, engage members and provide oversight. The amended by-laws prevent the constitution from working but don’t provide an alternative workable model.

The board reacted with horror to a suggestion that they soften the new by-laws but don’t appear willing to improve their own performance so the club can operate under the new by-laws. Staff performance reviews and bonuses are soon to be agreed and Jake is fairly certain that his board will not make rational decisions or support the CEO’s recommendations. He knows that he needs to act decisively to avert disaster but doesn’t know where to start.

How can Jake create an environment that allows for effective management of the club before this situation spirals out of control? »

Séparation des fonctions de président du conseil et de chef de la direction : retour sur un grand classique !


Voici le deuxième billet présenté par le professeur Ivan Tchotourian de la Faculté de droit de l’Université Laval, élaboré dans le cadre de son cours de maîtrise Gouvernance de l’entreprise.

Dans le cadre d’un programme de recherche, il a été proposé aux étudiants non seulement de mener des travaux sur des sujets qui font l’actualité en gouvernance de l’entreprise, mais encore d’utiliser un format original permettant la diffusion des résultats. Le présent billet expose le résultat des recherches menées par Nadia Abida, Arnaud Grospeillet, Thomas Medjir et Nathalie Robitaille.

Ce travail revient sur les arguments échangés concernant la dissociation des fonctions de président du conseil d’administration et de chef de la direction. Ce billet alimente la discussion en faisant une actualité comparative des normes et des éléments juridiques, et en présentant les dernières statistiques en ce domaine.

Le papier initial des étudiants a été retravaillé par Nadia Abida afin qu’il correspondre au style du blogue . Bonne lecture ! Vos commentaires et vos points de vue sont les bienvenus.

« Je vous en souhaite bonne lecture et suis certain que vous prendrez autant de plaisir à le lire que j’ai pu en prendre à le corriger. Merci encore à Jacques de permettre la diffusion de ce travail et d’offrir ainsi la chance à des étudiants de contribuer aux riches discussions dont la gouvernance d’entreprise est l’objet ».  (Ivan Tchotourian)

 

Séparation des fonctions de président du conseil et de chef de la direction : retour sur un grand classique

 

Nadia Abida, Arnaud Grospeillet, Thomas Medjir, Nathalie Robitaille

Anciens étudiants du cours DRT-6056 Gouvernance de l’entreprise

 

La séparation entre les fonctions de président du conseil d’administration (CA) et du chef de la direction est l’un des facteurs incontournables de l’indépendance des administrateurs. Cette dernière est un indicateur de pratique de bonne gouvernance d’entreprise. Cependant, et malgré l’importance avérée de la séparation des deux fonctions, nombre d’entreprises continuent à en pratiquer le cumul. Les arguments foisonnent de part et d’autre, et ne s’accordent pas sur la nécessité de cette séparation.

redaction-des-statuts-de-sa

Un retour sur une proposition d’actionnaires de la banque JP Morgan démontre la nécessité de ne pas laisser ce sujet sans réflexions. Cette proposition en faveur d’une séparation des fonctions a été émise à la suite d’une divulgation par la société d’une perte s’élevant à 2 milliards de dollars… perte essuyée sous la responsabilité de son PDG actuel [1].

Ce n’est un secret pour personne que cette société a un passif lourd avec des pertes colossales engendrées par des comportements critiquables sur lesquels la justice a apporté un éclairage. Les conséquences de cette gestion auraient-elles été identiques si une séparation des pouvoirs avait était mise en place entre une personne agissant et une personne surveillant ?

 

Silence du droit et positions ambiguës

 

Les textes législatifs (lois ou règlements) canadiens, américains ou européens apportent peu de pistes de solution à ce débat. La plupart se montrent en effet silencieux en ce domaine faisant preuve d’une retenue étonnamment rare lorsque la gouvernance d’entreprise est débattue. Dans ses lignes directrices [2], l’OCDE – ainsi que la Coalition canadienne pour une saine gestion des Entreprises dans ses principes de gouvernance d’entreprise [3] – atteste pourtant de l’importance du cloisonnement entre les deux fonctions.

De ce cloisonnement résulte l’indépendance et l’objectivité nécessaires aux décisions prises par le conseil d’administration. Au Canada, le comité Saucier dans son rapport de 2001 et le rapport du Milstein center [4] ont mis en exergue l’importance d’une telle séparation. En comparaison, la France s’est montrée plus discrète et il n’a pas été question de trancher dans son Code de gouvernement d’entreprise des sociétés cotées (même dans sa version amendée de 2013) [5] : ce dernier ne privilégie ainsi ni la séparation ni le cumul des deux fonctions [6].

 

Quelques chiffres révélateurs

 

Les études contemporaines démontrent une nette tendance en faveur de la séparation des deux rôles. Le Canadian Spencer Stuart Board Index [7] estime qu’une majorité de 85 % des 100 plus grandes entreprises canadiennes cotées en bourse ont opté pour la dissociation entre les deux fonctions. Dans le même sens, le rapport Clarkson affiche que 84 % des entreprises inscrites à la bourse de Toronto ont procédé à ladite séparation [8]. Subsistent cependant encore de nos jours des entreprises canadiennes qui  permettent le cumul. L’entreprise Air Transat A.T. Inc en est la parfaite illustration : M. Jean-Marc Eustache est à la fois président du conseil et chef de la direction. A contrario, le fond de solidarité de la Fédération des travailleurs du Québec vient récemment de procéder à la séparation des deux fonctions. Aux États-Unis en 2013, 45 % des entreprises de l’indice S&P500 (au total 221 entreprises) dissocient les rôles de PDG et de président du conseil. Toutefois, les choses ne sont pas aussi simples qu’elles y paraissent : 27 % des entreprises de cet indice ont recombiné ces deux rôles [9]. Évoquons à ce titre le cas de Target Corp dont les actionnaires ont refusé la dissociation des deux fonctions [10].

 

Il faut séparer les fonctions !

 

Pendant longtemps, il a été d’usage au sein des grandes sociétés par actions, que le poste de président du conseil soit de l’apanage du chef de la direction. Selon les partisans du non cumul, fusionner ces deux fonctions revient néanmoins à réunir dans une seule main un trop grand pouvoir et des prérogatives totalement antagonistes, voir même contradictoires. En ce sens, Yvan Allaire [11] souligne qu’il est malsain pour le chef de la direction de présider aussi le conseil d’administration. Rappelons que le CA nomme, destitue, rémunère et procède à l’évaluation du chef de la direction. La séparation des deux fonctions trouve pleinement son sens ici puisqu’elle crée une contre mesure du pouvoir : le président du CA est chargé du contrôle permanent de la gestion, et le directeur général est en situation de subordination par rapport au CA.

Sous ce contrôle, le directeur général ne peut être que plus diligent et prudent dans l’exercice de ses fonctions, puisqu’il doit en rendre compte au CA. Des idées et décisions confrontées et débattues sont de loin plus constructives que des décisions prises de manière unilatérale. N’y a-t-il pas plus d’esprit dans deux têtes que dans une comme le dit le proverbe ? De plus, les partisans du non cumul avancent d’autres arguments. Il en va ainsi de la rémunération de la direction. Le cumul des deux fonctions irait de pair avec la rémunération conséquente. Celui qui endosse les deux fonctions est enclin à prendre des risques qui peuvent mettre en péril les intérêts financiers de la société pour obtenir une performance et un rendement qui justifieraient une forte rémunération. Par ailleurs, le cumul peut entrainer une négligence des deux rôles au profit de l’un ou de l’autre. Aussi, le choix du non cumul s’impose lorsque l’implication de la majorité ou encore, de la totalité des actionnaires ou membres dans la gestion quotidienne de la société, est faible. Cette séparation permet en effet aux actionnaires ou aux membres d’exercer une surveillance adéquate de la direction et de la gestion quotidienne de ladite société [12].

 

Attention à la séparation !

 

Nonobstant les arguments cités plus haut, la séparation des deux fonctions ne représente pas nécessairement une meilleure gestion du conseil d’administration. Les partisans du cumul clament que non seulement l’endossement des deux fonctions par une seule personne unifie les ordres et réduit les couts de l’information, mais que c’est aussi un mécanisme d’incitation pour les nouveaux chefs en cas de transition. Cela se traduit par la facilité de remplacer une seule personne qui détient les deux pouvoirs, à la place de remplacer deux personnes. Par ailleurs, la séparation limiterait l’innovation et diluerait le pouvoir d’un leadership effectif [13] en augmentant la rivalité entre les deux responsables pouvant même aller jusqu’à semer la confusion.

 

Coûts et flexibilité du choix

 

En dépit de la critique classique du cumul des fonctions, les deux types de structures sont potentiellement sources de bénéfices et de coûts, bénéfices et coûts que les entreprises vont peser dans leur choix de structure. Les coûts de la théorie de l’agence impliquent des arrangements institutionnels lorsqu’il y a séparation entre les fonctions de président et de chef de la direction [14]. Ces coûts sont occasionnés par exemple par la surveillance du CA sur le chef de la direction. Il devient plus cher de séparer les deux fonctions que de les unifier.

Cependant, une antithèse présentée par Andrea Ovans [15] soutient qu’au contraire il est plus cher d’unifier les deux fonctions que de les séparer. Comment ? Simplement à travers la rémunération (salaire de base, primes, incitations, avantages, stock-options, et les prestations de retraite). L’imperméabilité entre les deux fonctions qui apparaît comme « la » solution en matière de bonne gouvernance pourrait ne pas l’être pour toutes les entreprises.

Si le cumul des fonctions et les autres mécanismes de surveillance fonctionnement bien, pourquoi faudrait-il prévoir un changement ? De surcroit, le « one size fits all » n’est pas applicable en la matière. Devrait-on prévoir les mêmes règles en termes de séparation pour les grandes et petites entreprises ? Rien n’est moins sûr… Le cumul des fonctions apparaît plus adapté aux entreprises de petite taille : ceci est dû à la fluidité de communication entre les deux responsables et à la faiblesse de la quantité d’informations à traiter [16].

[1] Investors seek to split JP Morgan CEO, Chairman http://www.wfaa.com/news/business/192146051.html, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 12 Juillet 2014.

[2] http://www.oecd.org/fr/gouvernementdentreprise/ae/gouvernancedesentreprisespubliques/34803478.pdf, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 12 juillet 2014. Dans le même sens, voir l’instruction générale 85-201 et le rapport Cadbury en 1992.

[3] CCGG : Principes de gouvernance d’entreprise pour la mise en place de conseils d’administration performants, http://www.ccgg.ca/site/ccgg/assets/pdf/Principes_de_gouvernance.pdf, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 12 juillet 2014

[4] « Split CEO/Chair Roles: The Geteway to Good Governance? », http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/FacultyAndResearch/ResearchCentres/ClarksonCentreforBoardEffectiveness/CCBEpublications/SplitCEO.aspx, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 18 juillet 2014.

[5] Code de gouvernement d’entreprise des sociétés cotées (révisé en juin 2013), http://www.medef.com/fileadmin/www.medef.fr/documents/AFEP-MEDEF/Code_de_gouvernement_d_entreprise_des_societes_cotees_juin_2013_FR.pdf, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 15 juillet 2014.

[6] L’Union européenne ne s’est pas prononcée sur la séparation des deux fonctions. Voir à ce propos Richard Leblanc.

[7] Canadian Spencer Stuart Board Index 2013, https://www.spencerstuart.com/~/media/Canadian-Board-Index-2013_27Jan2014.pdf, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 12 Juillet 2014 ; p. 19.

[8] Public Submissions on Governance Issues, http://www.powercorporation.com/en/governance/public-submissions-governance-issues/may-12-2014-canada-business-corporations-act/#_ftn12, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 18 juillet 2014.

[9] Spencer Stuart Board Index 2013 (US), https://www.spencerstuart.com/~/media/PDF%20Files/Research%20and%20Insight%20PDFs/SSBI13%20revised%2023DEC2013.pdf, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 25 juillet 2014.

[10] Target shareholders narrowly reject splitting CEO, Chairman posts, http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2014/06/13/target-shareholders-narrowly-reject-splitting-ceo.html, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 18 juillet 2014.

[11] Yvan Allaire, « Un « bon » président du CA ? », http://droit-des-affaires.blogspot.ca/2007/11/un-bon-prsident-du-ca.html, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 23 juillet 2014.

[12] À ce propos, voir André Laurin, « La fonction de président de conseil d’administration », http://www.lavery.ca/upload/pdf/fr/DS_080203f.pdf, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 21 juillet 2014, p. 2.

[13] Aiyesha Dey, Ellen Engel and Xiaohui Gloria Liu, « CEO and Board Chair Roles: to Split or not to Split? », December 16, 2009, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1412827, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 22 juillet 2014.

[14] Idem.

[15] Voir Coûts élevés associés à la combinaison des rôles du président du conseil et du président de la société : https://jacquesgrisegouvernance.com/2014/06/29/couts-eleves-associes-a-la-combinaison-des-roles-du-president-du-conseil-et-du-president-de-la-societe/, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 21 juillet 2014.

[16] Aiyesha Dey, « What JPMorgan Shareholders Should Know About Splitting the CEO and Chair Roles », Research, http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/05/research-what-jpmorgan-shareho/, <en ligne>, date de consultation : 21 juillet 2014.

Les comités de risques | Maintenant plus « risqués » que les comités d’audit !


Voici un excellent article publié hier par Howard Davies dans le FT portant sur les nouvelles réalités de la gouvernance, particulièrement dans les institutions financières.

En effet, une enquête du Financial Times (The FT’s A-List), montre, de manière convaincante, que les comités de risques sont maintenant plus « redoutés » que les comités d’audit. C’est un phénomène récent qui n’est pas encore bien documenté mais l’expérience des membres de conseils semble indiquer que ces comités sont moins recherchés, principalement parce que les experts en risques siégeant sur les conseils sont trop peu nombreux.

Il y a 10 ans, les administrateurs accordaient peu de temps à la surveillance des risques, faisant ainsi une confiance presqu’aveugle aux experts de la direction. Les préoccupations et les priorités des conseils ont changé radicalement depuis 2008, notamment depuis que les autorités réglementaires rendent obligatoire la constitution de comités de risques sur les C.A. des institutions financières.

Plusieurs autres secteurs d’activité ont suivis en accordant une place prépondérante à la gestion des risques et à la mise en place de comités de risques distincts des comités d’audit.

L’article ci-dessous présente l’état de la situation et les changements qui s’imposent dans la gouvernance des organisations, Voici un extrait de cet article. Bonne lecture !

 

 Audit is no longer the chore the board dreads most

« There is uncertainty about what risk committees should do »

 

Until recently, most non-executive directors would have told you that the audit committee is the one they really wish to avoid. The meetings are long, the papers voluminous, and the duties burdensome. So the conclusion of a recent survey by Per Ardua, an executive search company, came as a surprise. Eighty per cent of respondents in the financial sector now say that the risk committee is the one to dodge – even though audit and remuneration committees have so far more often exposed non-executives to public criticism.

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The survey responses suggest three possible explanations. First, the risk committee has a broad range of responsibilities. For a bank, traditional value-at-risk measures, which reflect the likelihood that the bank’s loans will go bad, are just the beginning. The agenda has broadened into operational, regulatory, legal and reputational risk, demanding detailed knowledge of all areas of the business – and of the relevant rules within which they operate. Regulation is increasingly complex, and varies significantly by country.

Second, whereas audit committees look backwards, risk committees must look forwards – a more difficult task. True, the dividing line is not quite so stark in practice; some auditors do live in the here and now. But overseeing future risks requires greater exercise of judgment, and involves the use of stress testing and other relatively novel techniques.

Third, the regulatory focus on risk committees has grown. Before the Walker review of corporate governance in financial firms, most banks in the UK did not have a separate risk committee. The same was true in the US. The audit committee did the job in its spare time. Now regulators on both sides of the Atlantic look to the risk committee and its chairman to answer for the stability of a bank, to oversee compliance with capital regulation and to take responsibility for its resolution and recovery plans. Those plans are highly technical.

Source: www.linkedin.com

Voir Scoop.it – gouvernance

 

 

 

Comment le C.A. peut-il s’acquitter de la surveillance des cyber-risques ?


Aujourd’hui, j’attire votre attention sur un article publié par , paru sur le site Cisco Blog, qui porte sur les nouvelles responsabilités qui incombent aux membres des conseils d’administration en matière de surveillance des risques cybernétiques globaux de la société..

Il existe des « guidelines » très utiles qui peuvent aider les membres de la direction (CxC), ceux qui doivent attester (signer) de la véracité des éléments de divulgation relatifs aux risques cybernétiques.

Également, il existe des moyens pour les membres de conseils d’administration de s’assurer qu’ils exercent une veille efficace de ces risques. Cet article fait écho à la conférence du Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit , plus particulièrement à la session  « Finding the Sweet Spot to Balance Cyber Risk ».

Tammie Gartner Session

À mon avis, tous les administrateurs devraient se familiariser avec l’environnement et la gestion des cyber-risques car ceux-ci peuvent avoir des conséquences dramatiques sur la performance de l’organisation.

La lecture de cet article vous sensibilisera davantage à votre rôle d’administrateur et aux conséquences qui en découlent. Voici un extrait de celui-ci. Bonne lecture !

 

Cyber Threat Management from the Boardroom Risk: Lost in Translation

 

During the session, the panel had been discussing how the senior leadership teams address the problem of putting their signatures against the risk that cyber threats pose to their organizations. Tammie Leith made a point to the effect that it is just as important for our teams to tell us why we should not accept or acknowledge those risks so that we can increase investments to mitigate those risks.

What caught my attention was that the senior management teams are beginning to question the technical teams on whether or not appropriate steps have been taken to minimize the risks to the corporation. The CxO (senior leadership team that has to put their signature on the risk disclosure documents) teams are no longer comfortable with blindly assuming the increasing risks to the business from cyber threats.Aguilar Session

To make matters worse, the CxO teams and the IT security teams generally speak different languages in that they are both using terms with meanings relevant to their specific roles in the company. In the past, this has not been a problem because both teams were performing very critical and very different functions for the business. The CxO team is focused on revenue, expenses, margins, profits, shareholder value, and other critical business metrics to drive for success. The IT security teams, on the other hand, are worried about breaches, data loss prevention, indications of compromise, denial of services attacks and more in order to keep the cyber attackers out of the corporate network. The challenge is that both teams use the common term of risk, but in different ways. Today’s threat environment has forced the risk environment to blend. Sophisticated targeted attacks and advanced polymorphic malware affect a business’s bottom line. Theft of critical information, such as credit card numbers, health insurance records, and social security numbers, result in revenue losses, bad reputation, regulatory fines, and lawsuits. Because these teams have not typically communicated very well in the past, how can we ensure that they have a converged meaning for risk when they are speaking different “languages”?

In order to fully explore the variations to the term “risk” for the business, I wanted to understand what the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) required of corporations in reporting requirements to their shareholders. The 2013 Cybersecurity Executive Order signed by President Obama, and the release of the NIST Cyber Framework seemed to be giving the SEC a new reason to revisit the topic of cyber security with a revitalized vigor.

The SEC had already published guidance on how corporations should provide cyber security risk disclosures in the CV Disclosure Guidance: Topic No. 2 Date: October 13, 2011. However, the speech that SEC Commissioner Luis A. Aguilar gave at the “Cyber Risks and The Boardroom Conference” at the New York Stock Exchange on June 10 discussed what the “boards of directors can, and should, do to ensure that their organizations are appropriately considering and addressing cyber risks.” In proposing a strong case for the boards of directors to take action, he discussed the “threat of litigation and potential liability for failing to implement adequate steps to protect the company from cyber-threats.” He also discussed the derivative lawsuits that were brought against companies, their officers and directors relating to data breaches. What caught my attention most about the speech is when he said, “Thus, boards that chose to ignore, or minimize, the importance of cybersecurity oversight responsibility, do so at their own peril.”

Commissioner Aguilar made a strong recommendation for corporations to voluntarily adopt the NIST Cybersecurity Framework in order to begin addressing the problem with the statement, “While the Framework is voluntary guidance for any company, some  commenters have already suggested that it will likely become a baseline for best practices by companies, including assessing legal or regulatory exposure to these issues or for insurance purposes.”

I am not disagreeing with Commissioner Aguilar, but in practice, this is an incredible challenge for any board of directors as they are now being asked to provide direct cyber security oversight to the internal day-to-day operations of the organization or risk “peril.”

…..

 

Les investisseurs réclament plus d’engagement et d’ouverture de la part du conseil d’administration


 

 

Les investisseurs et les actionnaires réclament avec de plus en plus d’insistance la possibilité d’engager des communications avec les administrateurs.

L’article d’Andrew Ross Sorkin*  publié dans  DealBook Column du NYT rappelle les principaux arguments des actionnaires activistes et des investisseurs institutionnels qui militent en faveur de cette exigence ainsi que les raisons traditionnelles qui amènent les conseils d’administration à rester à l’écart de ces récentes demandes.

Je crois, comme l’auteur, que les entreprises publiques doivent adopter des politiques qui encadrent clairement le processus d’engagement entre actionnaires/investisseurs et administrateurs de sociétés. Voici un extrait de cet article. Bonne lecture !

Investors to Directors, ‘Can We Talk?’

What if lawmakers never spoke to their constituents?

Oddly enough, that’s exactly how corporate America operates. Shareholders vote for directors, but the directors rarely, if ever, communicate with them.

Within the clubby world of directors, communicating with shareholders, big or small, is overtly frowned upon: “We endorse the principle that direct engagement involving directors should not be a routine method of engagement for most U.S. companies and for most investors,” according to the Conference Board Governance Center Task Force on Corporate/Investor Engagement.

That’s why it was so unusual for the chairmen of at least 1,000 large United States public companies to receive a letter this month from a group of shareholders representing more than $10 trillion in assets with a demand: Talk to us. The letter, signed by representatives of some of the biggest investment groups, including BlackRock, Vanguard and Calstrs, insisted that boards open up.

“Engagement between public company directors and their company’s shareholders is an idea whose time has come,” wrote the group, known as the Shareholder-Director Exchange. “We believe that U.S. public companies, in consultation with management, should consider formally adopting a policy providing for shareholder-director engagement.”

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What was uncommon about the letter was that it came not from activist investors like Carl C. Icahn or William A. Ackman, but from institutional investors that until recently had traditionally always supported whatever a company’s board recommended. Now, those investors want a dialogue.

The reason boards have long shunned speaking with investors is multifaceted. Management — the chief executive, chief financial officer and so on — usually have meetings with the company’s biggest shareholders. Some directors avoid meetings. worried about speaking with one voice. Most don’t consider it their responsibility. Some are anxious about accidentally disclosing sensitive information. A memo to directors on this topic from the law firm Latham & Watkins was explicitly titled “Dangerous Talk?”

Some chief executives are insecure and don’t want shareholders to get too close to their boards for fear they will have undue influence. After all, most directors rely directly on management and their presentations to understand what’s going on inside the company and what shareholders think.

And then there is this: “Many top executives seem to think that board members cannot be trusted with such interactions,” according to Harvard Business Review. “Yet if directors cannot be trusted to meet with and listen to shareholders, how can they be expected to competently govern a corporation?”

…..

Vous pouvez également lire la lettre d’un investisseur institutionnel à l’intention du conseil d’administration, en particulier à l’attention du président du conseil, parue dans le Financial Times du 25 juillet 2014. Vous devrez vous inscrire pour consulter les pages du FT.

Investors want direct access to the boardroom

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*Andrew Ross Sorkin is the editor at large of DealBook.

Les investissements des fonds activistes créent-ils une réelle valeur à long terme ?


Récemment, plusieurs experts de la gouvernance des sociétés se sont questionnés (et prononcés) sur la nature de la création de valeur et sur les conséquences à long terme apportées par les fonds de couverture (« edge funds »). 

Ce court billet de Martin Lipton, associé principal de la firme Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, spécialisée dans les activités de fusions et acquisitions ainsi que dans les questions qui touchent la gouvernance et les stratégies d’affaires, est basé sur la réponse que la firme adresse à une importante étude empirique des auteurs Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang sur les bénéfices à long terme des actionnaires activistes.

Cette étude est disponible au lien suivant : The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism. Les résultats sont résumés dans un billet du Forum post et dans le Wall Street Journal op-ed article.

Ce qu’il y a de particulier dans ce court billet de Lipton, c’est qu’il vante les mérites d’une étude de l’IGOPP qui pourfend la méthodologie de l’étude économétrique de Bebchuk et al.

Je vous invite donc au débat qui fait rage dans les cercles de la gouvernance en vous référant au document des auteurs Allaire et Dauphin.

 

 “Activist” hedge funds

 

Voici cette courte introduction de Lipton qui illustre parfaitement sa prise de position en faveur des arguments de l’étude de l’IGOPP. Bonne lecture ! Vos commentaires sont appréciés.

 

About a year ago, Professor Lucian Bebchuk took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to declare that he had conducted a study that he claimed proved that activist hedge funds are good for companies and the economy. Not being statisticians or econometricians, we did not respond by trying to conduct a study proving the opposite. Instead, we pointed out some of the more obvious methodological flaws in Professor Bebchuk’s study, as well as some observations from our years of real-world experience that lead us to believe that the short-term influence of activist hedge funds has been, and continues to be, profoundly destructive to the long-term health of companies and the American economy.

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Recently, the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations issued a paper that more systematically examines the flaws of Professor Bebchuk’s econometric and statistical models, concluding that “the Bebchuk et al. paper illustrates the limits of the econometric tool kit, its weak ability to cope with complex phenomena; and when it does try to cope, it sinks quickly into opaque computations, remote from the observations on which these computations are supposedly based.” The paper also observes that “activist hedge funds operate in a world without any other stakeholder than shareholders. That is indeed a myopic concept of the corporation bound to create social and economic problems, were that to become the norm for publicly listed corporations.”

Further the Institute’s paper concludes: “[T]he most generous conclusion one may reach from these empirical studies has to be that “activist” hedge funds create some short-term wealth for some shareholders (and immense riches for themselves) as a result of investors, who believe hedge fund propaganda (and some academic studies), jumping in the stock of targeted companies. In a minority of cases, activist hedge funds may bring some lasting value for shareholders but largely at the expense of workers and bond holders; thus, the impact of activist hedge funds seems to take the form of wealth transfer rather than wealth creation.”

The Institute’s paper, “Activist” hedge funds, is well worth reading for its academically rigorous, as well as common sense, refutation of Bebchuk’s claims.

Les relations d’amitié entre un administrateur et son PCD (CEO) peuvent influer sur ses obligations de diligence !


Voici un compte rendu, paru dans le NYT, d’un article scientifique, publié dans The Accounting Review en juillet 2014, qui montre que les administrateurs ayant des relations d’amitié avec le président et chef de la direction (PCD) de l’entreprise sont moins enclins à exercer une supervision serrée des activités de la direction.

Cependant, le fait de divulguer ces relations personnelles n’a pour effet de raffermir les devoirs de diligence et de vigilance des administrateurs, mais sert plutôt de prétexte pour les dédouaner en leur permettant d’être encore plus tolérants des actions de leur PCD.

Les auteurs tirent deux conclusions de ces résultats : (1) le fait de divulguer des conflits ou des relations personnelles n’élimine pas les conséquences négatives reliées à cette divulgation et (2) les actionnaires doivent se méfier des liens trop étroits que certains administrateurs entretiennent avec leur PCD.

Rappelons-nous que trop près n’est pas préférable à trop loin. Un juste équilibre doit s’imposer !

L’étude “Will Disclosure of Friendship Ties between Directors and CEOs Yield Perverse Effects? » a été conduite par Jacob M. Rose et Anna M. Rose de Bentley University, Carolyn Strand Norman de Virginia Commonwealth University et Cheri R. Mazza de Sacred Heart University. En voici quelques extraits. Bonne lecture !

 

 The C.E.O. Is My Friend. So Back Off

 

…

But the research makes a counterintuitive finding as well. The conventional wisdom holds that when you disclose personal ties, you create transparency and better governance. The experiment found that when social relationships were disclosed as part of director-independence regulations, board members didn’t toughen their oversight of their chief-executive pals. Rather, the directors went easier on the C.E.O., perhaps believing that they had done their duty by disclosing the Relationship.

IMG_20140515_121841

…

Now for the results: Among the directors who counted the C.E.O. as a friend, 46 percent said they would cut research and development by one-quarter or more to ensure a bonus payout to their pal. By contrast, only 6 percent of directors with no personal ties to the chief executive agreed to reduce research and development to generate a bonus.

That’s to be expected.

The results get more interesting when disclosure is added to the mix.  An astonishing 62 percent of directors who disclosed a friendship with the C.E.O. said they would cut $10 million or more from the budget — the amount necessary to generate a bonus.  Only 28 percent of the directors who had not disclosed their relationship with the executive agreed to make the cuts necessary to generate a bonus.

Only one director with no ties to the executive agreed to cut the budget by $10 million or more.

Mr. Rose, an author of the paper, said he and his colleagues were surprised that so many directors said they’d be willing to put the company at risk to ensure a bonus for their pal, the C.E.O. “If just by mentioning that you’re friends with the C.E.O. it affects their decision-making, we think the effects going on in the real world are much, much larger than what we picked up in the lab,” Mr. Rose said in an interview last week.

Even more disturbing, he said, was that so many directors seemed to think that disclosing their friendships with the C.E.O. gave them license to put the executive’s interests ahead of the company’s.

“When you disclose things, it may make you feel you’ve met your obligations,” Mr. Rose said. “They’re not all that worried about doing something to help out the C.E.O. because everyone has had a fair warning.”

…

Les grands enjeux reliés à la rémunération des administrateurs canadiens


Il y a peu d’informations colligées sur les rémunérations versées aux administrateurs de sociétés canadiennes. Michel Magnan, professeur et titulaire de la chaire de gouvernance d’entreprise Stephen A. Jarislowsky de l’École de gestion John-Molson, Université Concordia, a récemment publié, en collaboration avec l’IGOPP, les résultats d’une étude fort pertinente sur le sujet.

Le rapport fait ressortir plusieurs constats dont les suivants :

(1) Sur la période de 10 ans allant de 2001 à 2010, les honoraires annuels moyens touchés par les administrateurs de sociétés ouvertes canadiennes ont augmenté de 465%. Cette hausse considérable n’est toutefois pas uniforme parmi toutes les sociétés, puisque les augmentations les plus importantes se retrouvent dans les grandes institutions financières ainsi que dans les sociétés pétrolières et minières.

(2) La rémunération des administrateurs de sociétés canadiennes reste significativement inférieure à celle octroyée par des sociétés américaines comparables.

(3) La rémunération des administrateurs n’a pas atteint des niveaux que l’on pourrait juger excessifs compte tenu de l’accroissement des exigences institutionnelles et réglementaires durant la période.

(4) Le débat sur la rémunération des administrateurs et leur indépendance doit être vu comme un enjeu de composition et de fonctionnement du conseil d’administration. Si des cas de rémunération excessive surviennent, ils ne font que refléter des problèmes de gouvernance sous-jacents plus sérieux, lesquels minent la légitimité et possiblement la crédibilité du conseil

(5) Nous sommes dans un contexte de gouvernance fiduciaire. Les administrateurs sont donc préoccupés par la conformité aux lois et règlements, la mise en place et le suivi des mécanismes et des systèmes de contrôle, d’incitation et de reddition des comptes. Leur rémunération est ainsi fonction de ce rôle.

Vous trouverez, ci-dessous, un sommaire du rapport, notamment de ses recommandations.  Bonne lecture !

 

Rémunération des administrateurs et gouvernance : enjeux et défis

 

Les attentes envers les administrateurs en termes de crédibilité, de disponibilité et de légitimité ont considérablement augmenté depuis le début des années 2000. Leur rémunération a suivi mais les jetons de présence ont-ils une incidence sur le comportement et les décisions des membres des conseils ?P1030086

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Il ressort de cette analyse que la rémunération des administrateurs n’est qu’une facette de la gouvernance du conseil d’administration, et pas nécessairement la plus stratégique, puisqu’elle ajoute peu à des processus de nomination et d’évaluation des administrateurs qui sont déjà rigoureux. La rémunération des administrateurs doit refléter le fait que leur responsabilité est conjointe, continue et orientée vers la veille des intérêts à long terme de l’entreprise dans son ensemble, et non seulement des intérêts à court terme de certains actionnaires. À cet effet, le rapport propose plusieurs recommandations, notamment :

La priorité d’un conseil en matière de gouvernance est de maintenir et accroître sa légitimité et sa crédibilité au moyen de pratiques et processus rigoureux.

La rémunération des administrateurs ne doit pas reposer sur l’atteinte d’objectifs ou de buts à court terme.

La rémunération d’un administrateur doit être suffisamment élevée pour attirer des candidats crédibles, intègres et détenant les compétences spécifiques correspondant aux objectifs de la société.

Les administrateurs doivent détenir un investissement significatif à long terme dans les actions de l’entreprise.

La rémunération des administrateurs devrait être uniforme entre les individus qui ont des tâches similaires.

La rémunération des administrateurs doit refléter de manière rationnelle les risques spécifiques qu’ils encourent.

Les investisseurs n’hésitent pas à remettre en question les compétences et les décisions des administrateurs. Dans un tel contexte, leur rémunération risque de devenir un enjeu de gouvernance important. C’est pourquoi ce rapport de l’IGOPP cadre le débat par une analyse de déterminants potentiels de la rémunération et suggère des principes et recommandations qui permettront de guider le travail des conseils en la matière.

La notoriété du blogue « Gouvernance des entreprises » atteint de nouveaux sommets


C’est hier que le blogue Gouvernance | Jacques Grisé a franchi le cap des 100 000 visiteurs et contributeurs. Aujourd’hui, je fais relâche !

Je suis fier de cet accomplissement; je crois que ce blogue est nécessaire à l’exemplification de la saine gouvernance et qu’il constitue, en quelque sorte, une base de données essentielle aux activités de recherche dans le domaine.

Merci à toutes les personnes qui m’ont encouragé au cours des dernières années, plus particulièrement aux dirigeants du Collège des administrateurs de sociétés (CAS) qui soutiennent cette initiative depuis le début.

 

 À propos !

 

Ce blogue fait l’inventaire des documents les plus pertinents et récents en gouvernance des entreprises. La sélection des billets, « posts », est le résultat d’une veille assidue des articles de revues, des blogues et sites web dans le domaine de la gouvernance, des publications scientifiques et professionnelles, des études et autres rapports portant sur la gouvernance des sociétés, au Canada et dans d’autres pays, notamment aux États-Unis, au Royaume-Uni, en France, en Europe, et en Australie. IMG_00000971

Chaque jour, je fais un choix parmi l’ensemble des publications récentes et pertinentes et je commente brièvement la publication. L’objectif de ce blogue est d’être la référence en matière de documentation en gouvernance dans le monde francophone, en fournissant aux lecteurs une mine de renseignements récents (les billets quotidiens) ainsi qu’un outil de recherche simple et facile à utiliser pour répertorier les publications en fonction des catégories les plus pertinentes.

 

Le vote obligatoire des actionnaires dans les cas de changements importants prévient-il les mauvaises transactions ?


Quelles transactions devraient requérir l’approbation obligatoire de tous les actionnaires ? L’article de Marco Becht, professeur de gouvernance corporative à l’Université libre de Bruxelles; Andrea Polo, du département d’économie et Business à l’Universitat Pompeu Fabra et Barcelona GSE; et Stefano Rossi du département de finance de Purdue University, s’intéresse à la limite du pouvoir qu’il est nécessaire de laisser aux actionnaires plutôt qu’au conseil d’administration.

En Grande-Bretagne (UK), les offres faites à des entreprises-cibles de grandes tailles sont considérées comme des transactions de classe 1 et donc obligatoirement sujettes à l’approbation des actionnaires. Les résultats de cette étude montrent que les bénéfices financiers résultant d’une telle approche sont très importants.

Plusieurs juridictions ont choisi d’exclure les acquisitions de tailles importantes du vote de l’actionnariat, au détriment de l’avoir des actionnaires selon l’étude. Bien entendu, lorsqu’une transaction change profondément la nature de l’entreprise et peut potentiellement avoir des conséquences importantes sur la valeur des actions, celle-ci doit être traitée lors d’une assemblée extraordinaire des actionnaires.

« Our paper infers that mandatory voting makes boards more likely to refrain from overpaying or from proposing deals that are not in the interest of shareholders »

Voici un extrait de l’article publié dans le Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation. Vous pouvez télécharger tout le document ici.

Bonne lecture ! Vos commentaires, portant sur la souveraineté des C.A., sont les bienvenus.

Does Mandatory Shareholder Voting Prevent Bad Corporate Acquisitions ?

In our paper, Does Mandatory Shareholder Voting Prevent Bad Corporate Acquisitions?, which was recently made publicly available as an ECGI and Rock Center Working Paper on SSRN, we examine how much power shareholders should delegate to the board of directors. In practice, there is broad consensus that fundamental changes to the basic corporate contract or decisions that might have large material consequences for shareholder wealth must be taken via an extraordinary shareholder resolution (Rock, Davies, Kanda and Kraakman 2009). Large corporate acquisitions are a notable exception. In the United Kingdom, deals larger than 25% in relative size are subject to a mandatory shareholder vote; in most of continental Europe there is no vote, while in Delaware voting is largely discretionary.IMG_20140516_124706

The consequences for Delaware corporation shareholders are well documented in the relevant finance literature. A large percentage of deals initiated by U.S. acquirers destroy shareholder value with aggregate announcement losses running in billions of U.S. dollars. Shareholder voting exists, but it is voluntary and therefore endogenous. Deals facing potential shareholder opposition can be restructured to avoid a vote, as was recently the case with Kraft Inc.’s bid for Cadbury Plc, after public opposition from Warren Buffett. Shareholder voting in the United States is not a binding constraint and previous empirical studies based on U.S. data are rendered inconclusive.

Under the U.K. listing rules, bids for relatively large targets are called “Class 1 transactions” and are subject to mandatory shareholder approval. In a representative sample of acquirers listed on the main market in London, Class 1 transactions are associated with an aggregate gain to acquirer shareholders of $13.6 billion, over 1992-2010. Similar U.S. transactions in terms of size and other observable characteristics that are not subject to shareholder approval are associated with an aggregate loss of $210 billion for acquirer shareholders over the same period; and smaller Class 2 U.K. transactions, also not subject to shareholder approval, are associated with an aggregate loss of $3 billion. The findings are robust to various controls for deal characteristics and also hold at the U.K. mandatory voting threshold, where deals are very similar except in their voting status.

How does mandatory voting bring about these positive Class 1 results? Our paper infers that mandatory voting makes boards more likely to refrain from overpaying or from proposing deals that are not in the interest of shareholders. We find that shareholders never voted against Class 1 transactions ex-post and deals that were poorly received by the market at announcement were often dropped before they reached the voting stage. The results show that giving shareholder a direct decision right over large transactions can have a positive causal impact by discouraging bad corporate acquisitions.

Many jurisdictions have chosen to exclude large acquisitions from the list of fundamental changes that are outside the scope of delegated board authority. The advantages of board delegation such as reduced legal costs and greater speed and flexibility are shown to be preferred to explicit shareholder approval. This study shows that the benefits of mandatory voting on large corporate acquisitions can be large, shedding new light on this trade-off.