He Serves on 92 Boards
from
September/October 2003
by Jessica Heim Fourneret
William J. Schneider, 58, is a busy man. He’s a director of each of the 92 fixed-income mutual funds run by the Nuveen Advisory Corp., whose parent, Nuveen Investments Inc., has some $80 billion in investments under management. Schneider shares boardroom duties with five other outsiders, but he may be the busiest of the lot. He’s the senior partner and chief operating officer of Miller-Valentine Group, a commercial real estate company in Dayton, Ohio, and chairs the local Miami Valley Hospital and the Dayton Development Coalition.
On the face of it, Schneider must be one of the world’s great time managers. According to Nuveen proxies, each of the 92 funds held four regular board meetings and one special meeting last year. Each of their audit committees—and Schneider served on all of them—met at least twice. That’s a minimum of 553 meetings total, and Schneider, say the proxies, attended about 75% of them—perhaps 414. The hospital board and the development group met quarterly during the year, and he made all those sessions, the institutions report. The grand total of meetings: 422.
Did he really go to that many? The company isn’t saying, and Schneider didn’t return phone calls. But he probably didn’t. Presumably, most Nuveen board and committee meetings happened simultaneously, and directors don’t collect multiples of their per-meeting fees for attending simultaneous meetings.
Heavy responsibilities are common in the mutual fund industry, which has traditionally expected directors to govern entire families of funds. But how good a job can they really do? It’s a question more reformers are asking. “There are directors who serve on too many boards, and they do so not only at the peril of shareholders-investors, but at their own peril,” says Larry Sonderquist, director of Vanderbilt Law School’s Corporate and Securities Law Institute. “In the final analysis, the question of whether they properly do their job may get answered by a jury. And it is not going to be easy to convince a jury that a director can do the job properly for a mass of boards.”
From an investor’s viewpoint, Schneider and his co-directors are doing just fine. Morningstar ranks 51 of those 92 funds, and found that in 2002, 45 of them outperformed their peers. Nuveen must be happy with the directors’ performance, too. Next year it is reorganizing its boards, which will mean more work for some directors—among them Schneider, who will add 12 more funds to his responsibilities. With that change comes extra pay: The annual retainer for directors will increase from $60,000 to $65,000, board meeting fees from $1,750 to $2,000, and audit committee meeting fees from $500 to $1,000.
