Pfizer's Rx for Investor Relations
from January/February 2008
by Randy Myers
Along with three of his outside directors, Jeffrey Kindler, 51, chairman and CEO of Pfizer Inc., sat down with some of the drugmaker’s biggest institutional shareholders in October and talked about such things as how the board’s governance policies affect executive compensation. That’s been a big problem for Pfizer, given the $200 million that previous CEO Henry McKinnell collected at the end of a regime that left stockholders badly bruised.
The gathering, one of the first of its kind, seems to have soothed some of the pain. Glenn Booraem, who attended on behalf of the Vanguard mutual fund company, where he is a principal and manager of the proxy voting and corporate governance program, says, “I think the meeting was emblematic of a growing trend of outreach we see by companies to generally get a better understanding of their investors.”
Neither Booraem nor Pfizer would disclose what was discussed at the hourlong session, but Booraem says that Pfizer’s directors were “very much in a listening mode, and generally receptive to the views expressed.”
The board participants were lead director Constance Horner, 65, former commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and chair of Pfizer’s corporate governance committee; W. Don Cornwell, 59, chairman and CEO of Granite Broadcasting Corp. and chair of the audit committee; and Dana Mead, 71, chairman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corp. and chair of the compensation committee.
Booraem applauds Pfizer’s willingness to hash out corporate governance issues with shareholders: “Instead of talking to investors in the midst of proxy season, more productive meetings like this [enable us to] talk about a range of issues and share points of view on an interactive basis.”
Patrick McGurn, executive vice president of Institutional Shareholder Services, which advises shareholders on corporate governance issues, likes the concept of such meetings too. “It’s either engage or confront, and I think engagement works a lot better,” he says. “We’re hoping other companies will follow the trail the folks at Pfizer are laying down.”
