> Does anyone know of any prominent case where a major company passed a shareholder proposal? And/or the board recommended in favor of one?
In my experience, the people with enough savvy to get a shareholder proposal passed for an individual company will instead field their own candidates for the board.
When competent shareholder proposals are presented, they usually are done across a swath of the market and have to do with corporate governance. Managers of major market players (e.g. pension funds) will decide they want a certain change and then present it to many companies.
> In my experience, the people with enough savvy to get a shareholder proposal passed for an individual company will instead field their own candidates for the board.
Boardseats are usually handed out to representatives of large blocks of stock so there may be a set of people who are savvy enough but do not have enough stock to propose board candidates, or if they do propose them will likely not have a whole lot of chance of seeing their candidates make it to the board.
Probably roughly equal to how much chance their proposals have of passing in the first place but still, such people can and probably do exist.
In my experience, the people with enough savvy to get a shareholder proposal passed for an individual company will instead field their own candidates for the board.
When competent shareholder proposals are presented, they usually are done across a swath of the market and have to do with corporate governance. Managers of major market players (e.g. pension funds) will decide they want a certain change and then present it to many companies.
As an example, board declassification proposals passed at over 50 companies in the first half of this decade; note some of these were supported by the board or at least not opposed: http://www.srp.law.harvard.edu/companies-voting-on-proposals...