In other words, you're agreeing with me; Elop is benefiting from a windfall of lack of information. This lack of information forces companies to make inefficient choices of leaders and waste lots of money on leadership.
So Nokia has a lack of information but you don't ? What decision should have been made? And whose responsibility is it to make that decision?
Sure there are problems with corporate governance but ultimately we're talking about the risk of misallocating capital belonging to investors, whose job it is to oversee the allocation.
Not to nitpick, but since we're on the topic of corporate governance... Hopefully this will make it a bit more clear on why the governance issues are so murky: At least in Canada, and I'm fairly sure the United States as well it's actually not investors' job to oversee the allocation. The board of directors manages the company. Investors merely get to vote for who gets to be on the board of directors.
Sooo, it's the job of the board of directors to select who the CEO (an officer in Corporate Law-speak) is.
That's a good question (not sarcasm, it might come off that way). I actually do have a small investment yet I never planned on exercising any control and only control a trivial number of shares. There's a fair bit of academic debate on these theories of control and how shareholders relate to companies.
Personally I think there's a lot of freeloading off the small group of big players that do exercise control. I have a certain amount of faith that they won't vote in a way that's seriously adverse to my interests as a little fish.
Then shouldn't part of their job also be researching and coming up with a larger pool of candidates for a position of that importance? Not saying Nokia didn't necessarily do that, but I suspect in a lot of cases, there tends to be a short list that people choose from initially. Expanding out from that short list and spending more time gathering more info might take more time, but would ultimately be in the shareholders' interest.
