Executive Summary/Highlights:

A long-running, two-year effort by the senior corporate governance heads of major U.S. investors to develop the first stewardship code for the U.S. market culminated today in the launch of the Investor Stewardship Group (ISG) and ISG’s associated Framework for U.S. Stewardship and Governance. Investor co-founders and signatories include U.S. Asset Managers (BlackRock; MFS; State Street Global Advisors; TIAA Investments; T. Rowe Price; Vanguard; ValueAct Capital; Wellington Management); U.S. Asset Owners (CalSTRS; Florida State Board of Administration (SBA); Washington State Investment Board); and non-U.S. Asset Owners/Managers (GIC Private Limited (Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth Fund); Legal and General Investment Management; MN Netherlands; PGGM; Royal Bank of Canada (Asset Management)).

Focused explicitly on combating short-termism, providing a “framework for promoting long-term value creation for U.S. companies and the broader U.S. economy” and promoting “responsible” engagement, the principles are designed to be independent of proxy advisory firm guidelines and may help disintermediate the proxy advisory firms, traditional activist hedge funds and short-term pressures from dictating corporate governance and corporate strategy.

Importantly, the ISG Framework would operate to hold investors, and not just public companies, to a higher standard, rejecting the scorched-earth activist pressure tactics to which public companies have often been subject, and instead requiring investors to “address and attempt to resolve differences with companies in a constructive and pragmatic manner.” In addition, the ISG Framework emphasizes that asset managers and owners are responsible to their ultimate long-term beneficiaries, especially the millions of individual investors whose retirement and long-term savings are held by these funds, and that proxy voting and engagement guidelines of investors should be designed to protect the interests of these long-term clients and beneficiaries. While the ISG Framework is not intended to be prescriptive or comprehensive in nature, with companies and investors being free to apply it in a manner they deem appropriate, it is intended to provide guidance and clarity as to the expectations that an increasingly large number of investors will have not only of public companies, but also of each other.

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