Robert Agu Monks, a prominent Massachusetts family lawyer and businessman, ran three times to the US Senate, and found his calling in his 40s as an influential advocate for shareholder rights, passed away on April 29th at his home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He was 91 years old.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed about a week before his death, his son, Bobby said.
By the age of 40, Monks had worked towards partners at the Goodwin Proctor Law Office in Boston, accumulating the wealth that ran local oil and coal companies and other businesses, and had three successful times for the U.S. Senator in Maine.
While campaigning during the 1972 Republican primary, he noticed “a large, smooth bubble of industrial emissions” in the river, Monks wrote in an unpublished memoir. That and other signs of pollution made him wonder how he could have better control over corporate behavior. His answer was to persuade shareholders to assert ownership by pressureting corporate executives to act more responsibly on society as a whole. This epiphany ultimately gave him a sense of purpose and direction he was hoping for, as he explained.
He pursued the agenda of activists' shareholders at the U.S. Labor Bureau and was appointed in 1983 to oversee the pension plan. Then, in 1985, Monks, along with Nell Minnow, founded the Institutional Shareholder Services and the ISS. It advises investors on how to vote on issues such as board elections, compensation policies, and shareholder proposals.
ISS is currently majority owned by Germany's Deutsche Börse, and rival company Glass Lewis is today the largest provider of such advisory services. Their influence has been accused of some corporate leaders and Republican politicians of pursuing a “wake-up” agenda, and has recently begun to ask the Securities and Exchange Commission to curb them.
Monks' main target was the concentration of power at the highest level of corporate leadership. In 1991 he campaigned for seating at Sears' board of directors, Lowback & Company. Above all, he tried to restrain Edward A. Brennan's power.
Monks lost in that effort, but continued to drive Sears' strategy change. In May 1992, he purchased a full-page ad for the Wall Street Journal, naming Sears' board members and embarrassing them as “bad assets.”
At the time, Sears was trying to acquire financial services companies like brokerage company Dean Whitt Reynolds and discover credit card operations. But under pressure from Monks and other investors, Sears decided to dump those businesses later that year and focus on retail.
In 2003, Monks turned his attention to ExxonMobil. At the company's annual shareholders meeting, he spoke to Chairman and CEO Lee Raymond. “Your scope of work is global and goes beyond the usual business language to politics and foreign policy,” Monks said. “The scope of your power, the chairman is truly an empire. You are the emperor.”
In addition to launching the ISS, Monks founded a small money management company, writing books and essays, giving speeches, and forming a coalition with other corporate government crusades.
In part, more companies have split the work of chairman and chief executive officers as a result of his efforts and like-minded activists. (Among S&P 500 companies, 61% from 2000 in 2000 split these roles, according to the ISS.) There are far fewer insider-controlled boards, and institutional investors tend to demand effective, ethical governance.
Monks told the New York Times in 2007: “The idea that the company that caused the problem is exempt from trying to find a solution to that problem is something that exists in the elephant business, and there's no one going behind the elephant and cleaning it up.”
In one area of executives, he admitted that he cannot change his behavior. The CEO's pay package continues to rise from the level he considered “indecent” decades ago.
Monks used another animal's ratio phors to explain the limits of shareholder power. “When the two gorillas are ready to fight, they throw dust at each other. I'm in the gorilla dust business.
Robert Augustus Gardner Monks was born in Boston on December 4, 1933 and spent his childhood in what he described as the “rambling mansion” in the western Massachusetts town of Lennox. His ancestors, including Gardner and Peabody, were wealthy for generations. Dividends from AT&T and General Electric supported the family comfortably through depression.
His father, George Gardner Monks, was a priest of the Anglican Church and led the private Lennox School. His mother, the monk of Catherine (Knowles), runs the family and helps oversee the family's property.
After graduating from St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, Monks went to Harvard University and received his Bachelor of History in 1954. He stands out as a 6-foot-6 row player on the Varsity Crew and was awarded the Phi Beta Kappaki. He later rowed to Cambridge University in England, where he also studied Fiske's history as a scholar.
In 1954 he married Millicent Sprague, known as Millie, a descendant of the Carnegie Steel family. She later founded a dance company in Maine and wrote a memoir titled “Songs of Three Islands: The Iconic American Family's Story of Mental Illness.” She passed away in 2023.
In addition to his son, Mr. Monks is survived by his daughter, Melinda Monks. Three grandchildren. and six great grandchildren.
Monks received his law degree from Harvard University in 1958. At Goodwin Proctor, his first stop after law school, he impressed his colleagues with his ability to find clients amidst connections with many families. However, at age 31, he was tired of the law and left Goodwin, taking on various roles and in some cases sold family businesses.
A friend recruited him to the Director of Boston, a fund management concern, where he became chairman and major shareholder, and was cashed in 1981 when the company was sold.
As a Republican candidate for the Senate, Monks lost in the primary in 1972 to Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and in the 1976 general election to Democrat Senator Edmond Musky and Republican Susan Collins, who is in office in the 1996 primary. He concluded that he has little political talent. However, in his memoirs, he wrote that the campaign was a pleasant experience in which he brought into contact with working class people he would not otherwise meet.
His 1999 biography by Hilary Rosenberg was entitled “The Traitor of His Class,” a label that Mr. Monks called appropriate. A follower of transcendental meditation, he enjoyed being a heretic and needle jewel.
Still, he was careful not to exaggerate his heroism. “I'm more conservative than I think,” he told the Financial Times in 2005.
