> To be sincere, I have a strong preference for written content.
At the InfoQ podcast we always create a transcript of the whole episode. It takes quite some time to turn the spoken content into written content, but it's amazing how many people come to me to tell me that they only read the podcast, but never listen to it.
Makes you wonder why one would not immediately write an article rather than spending the effort to create the spoken content.
You might think "who is Christopher Hohn, and what is the TCI Fund", but this guy has a history of making money in weird ways. Just before the banking chrisis, in 2007, he managed to force one of the biggest banks of the the Netherlands (ABN Amro) to either be taken over or to be split up. He has a history of suing the boards of companies if he thinks they can be worth more to investors in some way or another.
You can read more about what happened with the ABN Amro bank back in the days in the super thick book "The Pray" (https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Prey-Wrong-Banking-Industry/d...). I read it last summer and it is surprisingly interesting for a book which follows the board of a big bank...
Activist investors are individuals with significant power who seek to enrich themselves by making life much worse for large numbers of people, without recourse, election or accountability. They are one of the significant negatives of capitalism that would benefit the rest of us if they were greatly reduced or removed.
Activist investors pressure management to improve. Most activists are funds and are accountable to their investors. The investors and ultimate beneficiaries are institions such as the Public School Employees’ Retirement System.
Activist investors pressure management to deliver more profits to investors. That's a narrow definition of "improvement". Doesn't matter who they represent, robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't make you right.
"robbing Peter to pay Paul" is an idiom used to express that causing one person harm to benefit another is not a good thing. When an investor forces a company to lay off staff, merge with another, sell off divisions, etc... (all actions TCI has done) people within those companies get laid off, their jobs change, wages stagnate, etc... and this is purely for a fund's enrichment. For me it doesn't matter if that fund is then donating to charity because I don't think charitable use of a fraction of profits justifies harmful tactics used to raise that money. That'll just have to be a difference of opinion between us.
If you want to move the goalposts from TCI to activist investors that try to improve a company, then that is a different thing as profit is not the primary motive of those changes. There are activist investors who simply do not invest in companies they do not agree with and in other companies try to address issues with how the company runs, pay gaps, tax compliance, workplace conditions, etc... This is actually trying to improve the company and the lives of the employees, at a possible cost to the company and investors, so very different from just trying to improve a company's profits. Ethical capitalism is a bit of an oxymoron but there is definitely an ethical spectrum of actions within capitalism. Not all actions are equal.
Both my father and uncle had acute leukemia three years ago. Their brothers went in for a check, but were not a match for stem cell transplants. Luckily, for both there was a match with a random stranger who went through the effort to donate their stem cells such as what happened in this blog post.
I can absolutely recommend everyone to register as a stem cell donor. Thanks to these random matches my father lives on.
As a random fun fact: he got to write one letter to the donor, who got to write one letter back. You never get their contact details, and don't even know in which country they live. Needless to say, tears were shed over the short letter conversation back and forth.
The earlier days you can see it speeds you up a lot. The later days (such as today) you still want to wrap your own head around difficult computer science concepts so it is kind of useless.
InfoQ's QCon conference frequently has an "architectures you always wondered about", which frequently has good talks. You can find them here: https://www.infoq.com/architecture-design/.
At the InfoQ podcast we always create a transcript of the whole episode. It takes quite some time to turn the spoken content into written content, but it's amazing how many people come to me to tell me that they only read the podcast, but never listen to it.
Makes you wonder why one would not immediately write an article rather than spending the effort to create the spoken content.