The 1980s, a decade of corporate raids evoked so memorably in the book Barbarians at the Gate, were one such revolutionary moment. But every so often shareholders revolt, not unlike citizens staging a coup when their leaders lose touch. At times of minimal pressure from shareholders, power has shifted toward managers, who pay themselves more, enjoy corporate perquisites, build dubious empires, and in some cases relax into mediocrity. Over the decades, the size of this gap has oscillated. As a company grows and its shareholders become more dispersed, they wrote, it becomes harder for shareholders to pressure managers, and a gap develops between the owners’ interests and the managers’ behavior. Means described the “separation of ownership and control” inherent in corporations, and noted that owners and managers have different goals. In their 1932 book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A.
(The cheapest rooms at the Balboa Bay Resort were four times as expensive as those at the Newport Mesa Inn, so we were staying four miles inland.) We would have plenty of time to badger Bielli at the meeting, when we would be clean, better dressed, and better prepared.į or as long as public companies have existed, so too has tension between shareholding owners and company managers. We were on a scouting trip, in advance of the company’s annual shareholder meeting the next morning we’d come to see the meeting room and plan our attack.
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We rolled down our windows to shout to him as we entered the resort’s roundabout, but then thought better of it. But the stock had tanked, we had lost more than $70,000, and we thought Bielli had lied to us. We had been pressuring Tejon Ranch’s executives, using the playbook that top activists have developed over the past decade or so.
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Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone. As professors who write about shareholder activism, we’d thought we’d seen an opportunity to mimic the big activists, such as Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn, who agitate to improve the transparency and performance of much larger companies. Tejon Ranch had appeared to us to be poorly managed. When we’d bought in about a year earlier, the shares had been worth nearly half a million dollars-a significant chunk of our retirement nest eggs. Together, the two of us owned more than 18,000 shares of Tejon Ranch, an investment our wives had advised us against. The company owns the largest continuous expanse of private land in California, a 270,000-acre parcel-about half the size of Rhode Island-wedged between two national forests, Los Padres and Sequoia. Tejon Ranch is a small public company headquartered in Lebec, about an hour north of Los Angeles, and its main asset is obvious from Interstate 5: real estate. How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All.
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