Cultivating relationships with proxy advisers

From the moment they arrived on the scene en masse after the Enron crisis, proxy advisers have been stirring up controversy. Doug Wilburne, vice president of IR at Textron in Providence, Rhode Island, believes the rise of proxy advisers has led to unintended consequences. In the interest of demonstrating diligence vis-à-vis governance issues for the companies they own, money managers have hired proxy advisers with strong views. What’s happened, Wilburne says, is that ‘investment