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Robert AG Monks, a lawyer and businessman of a prominent family in Massachusetts who walked to the US Senate three times without success, but found a calling in his 40S as an influential defender of the rights of the shareholders, died on April 29 in his house in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He was 91.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed about a week before his death, said his son, Bobby.
At the age of 40, Monks had worked up to be a partner at the Goodwin Procter law firm in Boston, gathered a fortune with a regional oil and coal company and other companies and made the first of three non -successful runs for the US Senator in Maine.
While campaigning during a Republican Primary there in 1972, he saw “large, slick bubbles of industrial discharge” in a river, Mr. Monks wrote in a non -published memoirs. That and other signs of pollution ensured that he wondered how business behavior can be better controlled. His answer was to convince shareholders to assert their property rights by putting pressure on business leaders to act more responsible against society in general. This Epiphany, as he described it, eventually gave him the feeling of goal and direction he had searched.
He strived for his agenda of the activist shareholder for the American labor department, where he was appointed in 1983 to supervise the pension system. And in 1985, Mr. Monks, with Nell Minowset up Institutional Shareholder ServicesOr ISS, which advises investors to vote on matters such as elections of directors, compensation policy and shareholders proposals.
ISS, now in majority in the hands of Deutsche Börse of Germany, and a rival company, Glass Lewis, are today the greatest providers of such advisory services. Their influence is such that some managers and republican politicians, who accuse the companies of the pursuit of “awake” agendas, recently called to the Securities and Exchange Commission to insert them.
The most important target of Mr Monks was the power concentration at the highest levels of business leadership. In 1991 he campaigned for a chair on the board of Sears, Roebuck & Co., whose share price had fallen in the midst of losses of market share to more agile retailers. Among other things, he tried to curb the powers of Edward A. Brennan, who then served both chairman and Chief Executive of Sears.
Mr Monks lost in that effort, but continued to insist on changes in the strategy of Sears. In May 1992 he bought an advertisement on full pages in the Wall Street Journal and called Sears board members and embarrassed it as ‘non-performing assets’.
Sears had tried to diversify at the time, buying financial service companies such as the Dean Witter Reynolds brokerage company and discovered credit card activities. But under pressure from Mr Monks and other investors, Sears decided later that year to dump those companies and to concentrate on retail.
In 2003, Mr. Monks are attention on Exxon Mobil. During the annual shareholders’ meeting of the company, he gives Lee Raymond, the chairman and Chief Executive. “The scope of your activities is worldwide and goes beyond the usual language of business and foreign policy,” said Mr Monks. “The scope of your power, Mr President, is really imperial. You are an emperor.”
In addition to starting ISS, Mr Monks founded a small fund management company, wrote books and essays, gave speeches and formed coalitions with other Corporate-Governance Crusaders.
Partly as a result of his efforts and those of like -minded activists, more companies divided the jobs of chairman and Chief Executive. (Among S&P 500 companies, 61 percent now divide those roles, an increase of 20 percent in 2000, according to ISS.) Much fewer boards are dominated by insiders, and institutional investors are more inclined to demand effective and ethical administration, Mrs. Minow, co-founder of ISS.
Mr Monks said to the New York Times in 2007: “The idea that a company that creates a problem is exempt from trying a solution to that problem is to find as if you are in the elephant industry, but no one who is in charge of going behind the elephant and tidy up afterwards.”
In one area, executive wage, he admitted that he could not change the behavior. Payment packages for chief executives have continued to rise from levels that he considered ‘obscene’ decades ago.
With the help of another animal metaphor, Mr Monks described the boundaries of the shareholder power: “When two gorillas prepare for fighting, they throw dust together. I am in the Gorilla-Dust-Business, and I am in the Gorilla-Doust-Business, not because I like it, but because it is the only game in the city.”
Robert Augustus Gardner Monks was born in Boston on December 4, 1933 and spent his early years in what he described as a ‘walking mansion’ in the Stad Lenox, the city of Massachusetts. His ancestors, including Gardners and Peabodys, had been rich for generations. Dividends of AT&T and General Electric have comfortably maintained the family due to depression.
His father, George Gardner Monks, was a priest in the episcopal church and led the private Lenox school. His mother, Katherine (Knowles) monks, led the household and helped to supervise the family property.
After graduating from the St. Paul’s School in Concord, Mr Monks went to Harvard and in 1954 he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in history. He had noticed a 6-foot-6-rower for the Varsity crew and received a Phi Beta Kappa test. He later rowed to the University of Cambridge in England, where he also studied history as a Fiske scholar.
In 1954 he married Millicent Sprague, known as Milly, a descendant of the Carnegie Steel family. She later founded a dance company in Maine and wrote a memoir, “Songs of Three Islands: A Story of Mental Illness in an iconic American family.” She died in 2023.
In addition to his son, Mr. Monks survived by a daughter, Melinda Monks; Three grandchildren; and six great -grandchildren.
Mr Monks obtained his diploma in Harvard in 1958. At Goodwin Procter, his first stop after the rights school, he impressed colleagues with his ability to find clients under his many family connections. At the age of 31, however, he was tired of the law and left Goodwin to take on various executive functions and in some cases selling the sale of family businesses.
A friend recruited him as director of Boston Co., a concern for fund management, where he became chairman and a large shareholder – and cashed when the company was sold in 1981. Donations to Republican causes have set him up for his appointment of the labor department during the Reagan administration.
As a chased Republican candidate for the Senate, Mr. Monks lost in 1972 to Senator Margaret Chase Smith in the Primary, to Senator Edmund Muskie, a Democrat, in the general elections in 1976, and to Susan Collins, a republican that remains in the Primary of 1996. He concluded that his political talents were small. In his memoirs, however, he wrote that campaign was a joyful experience that brought him into contact with people from the working class that he would otherwise never have met.
A biography of him from 1999 by Hilary Rosenberg was entitled “A traitor of his class,” A label that Mr. Monks mentioned appropriate. A dedicated of transcendental meditation, he liked to be a Maverick and Needling Plutocrats – a tendency that caused him to reduce his social circle, he wrote.
Yet he was careful not to overdo his heroism. “I am more conservative than I think,” he told the Financial Times in 2005. “I am talking about a brave game, but I have a lot of money and I never risk anything that I cannot afford to lose.”
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