By HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.
Are Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and Adelphia emblematic of the state of U.S. corporate governance?
Or is a better guide the fact that we have the world's strongest economy and its most dominant corporations, and that we recently endured only a mild recession after one of the longest booms in history? For that matter, against the long pattern of stock market ups and downs, even the downs of late have hardly been the stuff to cause stockbrokers to jump out windows.
The latter sometimes escapes notice. Most of the wealth wiped out in the past three years was concentrated in a handful of very large companies in the technology sector, whose stock prices merely returned to earth. Cisco, a still-thriving leader in Internet plumbing, saw half a trillion dollars in investor wealth wiped out at its lowest point -- to name just one of these megacap corrections. As a study by McKinsey's Tim Koller recently noted, once you factor out companies whose valuations were briefly inflated in the tech bubble, it's questionable whether we've been in a bear market at all.
Behind the Pay Boom
Governance of anything tends be adaptive and improvisational. That's true as much of corporate governance as city politics or the U.S. Congress. Let's consider today's focal dissatisfaction, the remarkable explosion of chief executive compensation, which, though sometimes exaggerated, marks perhaps the most impressive feature on the corporate-governance landscape in the past 15 years.
Before complaining that you, as shareholder, didn't vote for high CEO pay, let's remember that you did -- by buying shares during the long bull market pretty much in tandem with rising CEO pay. Before blaming crony boards, it's worth remembering that, by almost any standard, boards are more independent than they were 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Indeed, U.S. companies are more transparent and accountable than those in almost any other country, yet the vast increase in pay happened here, not there.
Finally, before complaining that CEOs have continued to make zillions from stock options in a bear market, recall that an option issued seven years ago, say, when the stock was worth $10 can't help being profitable at today's stock price of $20, even if the stock passed through $50 in between.
Corporate governance is not aimed at a platonic ideal of proportionality or seemliness. If paying a CEO a billion dollars instead of a million dollars would raise the share price by $1, the shareholder would be rational to pay the higher wage. Because the CEO's reward is tied to the stock price, shareholders have believed, rightly or wrongly, that no matter how big the option package, the transaction was necessarily win-win.
Some of us who've followed closely the increasing arc of CEO pay believe it's no coincidence that the rise began just as courts and legislatures were erecting obstacles to hostile takeovers. This intuition has been now been endorsed in a recent issue of the University of Chicago's law journal devoted to reflections on the 20th anniversary of the invention of the "poison pill," a takeover defense adopted by hundreds of companies since it was upheld by the Delaware Chancery Court in 1985.
Contrary to expectations, takeovers didn't stop -- they just stopped being hostile. Managers who might otherwise have resisted losing their jobs were brought back into line with big option packages that assured them of a personal payoff. Meanwhile, more emphasis was placed on requiring directors to act "independently" of management in evaluating a bid. These "adaptive devices," write Marcel Kahan and Edward Rock, "had the effect of transforming the pill, a potentially pernicious governance tool, into a device that is plausibly in shareholders' interest."
No adaptation can solve everything, however, and it's worth wondering in light of recent scandals if incentive pay and board independence are sufficient substitutes for the possibility of a hostile takeover.
The Disney Dilemma
Michael Eisner's remarkable achievements at Disney, it's worth nothing, began because the board in 1984 was casting about for new leadership and a new strategy to fend off hostile raiders. Though Mr. Eisner built the company into a born-again powerhouse, the stock has recently fallen into a muddle once more, and this time a hostile takeover is virtually inconceivable. What's more, Mr. Eisner recently managed to use precisely the new vogue for "independent" directors to demote his most urgent critic on the Disney board.
The real problem for Disney dissidents, though, is that they were utterly at a loss to propose an alternative to Mr. Eisner's strategy and leadership. That's where the prospect of a hostile bid comes in. It at least allows the possibility of outside money doing for (or to) a company what it won't do for itself.
Corporate-governance "reform" has been on every lip lately, yet precious little attention has been paid to reforming what economists call the market for corporate control. Instead we get proposals for separating the office of chairman and chief executive, appointing a "lead" director or recording a nominal accounting charge for management's stock options -- watery initiatives at best, utterly stylistic at worst.
Aside from the odd campaign by TIAA-CREF, the big pension-fund manager, against a given company's poison pill, most "reformers," true to their basically establishment credentials, have gone along with a steady erosion of shareholders' right to expect management to entertain an unsolicited bid. Yet the problem of corporate governance has always been how to constrain and discipline management's power.
Hectoring board members to act more independently is a poor substitute for the bracing possibility that dissatisfied shareholders could turn on a dime and sell the company out from under its present leaders to a hostile suitor. An important negative check on management went missing when we reined in hostile takeovers. Instead we were left waving ever-larger carrots in front of managements in hopes of inducing them to serve shareholder interests. Carrots are fine, but a stick is often handy, too.
-- Mr. Jenkins is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and writes the paper's weekly Business World column.
Write to Holman W. Jenkins Jr. at holman.jenkins@wsj.com
Updated February 24, 2003