Lifetime Achievement Awards presentation in Washington

The purpose of the Lifetime Achievement Award is to recognise individuals who have demonstrated exceptional achievements in the field of corporate governance over an extended period of time.

ICGN would like to congratulate this group of Lifetime Achievement Award winners, all of whom have demonstrated: 

• Exceptional achievements in the corporate governance field over an extended period.
• Contributions to significant improvements of corporate governance practice in one or more jurisdiction(s).
• Any governance and/or stewardship eco-system building efforts, including a leadership role of the Nominee working within an initiative or a coalition, whether the Nominee was responsible for drafting or creating charters and/or foundational documents, and the results of these collaborative efforts.
• A positive impact with long-term significance on one or more economies.
• Success in confronting obstacles to improving corporate governance, requiring vision, courage and fortitude.

These awards were presented on 7 March 2024, at the end of Day One of the ICGN Washington, D.C. Conference, hosted by the IFC, to:

• Professor Lucian Bebchuk
• Dr Stephen Davis, PHD
• Margaret (Peggy) Foran
• Jon Lukomnik - remarks
• Nell Minow

Please see our press release on the presentation and ICGN CEO Kerrie Waring’s remarks.

Nominations for the 2024 ICGN Achievement Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award category, are open until 29 March: ICGN Achievement Awards | ICGN The winners of the 2024 ICGN Achievement Awards and the ICGN Global Stewardship Disclosure Awards will be presented on 15 July 2024 during the ICGN 2024 Annual Conference, London.

Lifetime Achievement Awards were presented to:

Lucian Bebchuk, USA

Lucian Bebchuk serves as the James Barr Ames Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance, and the Founding Director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School. Bebchuk is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inaugural Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Network, and Director of the SSRN Corporate Governance Network.

Trained in both law and economics, Professor Bebchuk holds an LL.M. and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Harvard Economics Department. His research focuses on corporate governance, law and finance, and law and economics. Upon electing him to membership in 2000, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences cited him as “[o]ne of the nation’s leading scholars of law and economics,” who “has made major contribution to the study of corporate control, governance, and insolvency.”

Bebchuk is the author or coauthor of more than one hundred research papers, as well the widely acclaimed book Pay without Performance: the Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation. His papers have appeared in the top academic journals in law, in economics, and in finance. The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has ranked him as among the top five legal academics of all fields in terms of citations to his work in each of the past ten years.

Bebchuk’s work has been recognized by his having been elected to serve as President of the Western Economics Association International, President of the American Law and Economics Association, and Chair of the Business Association Section of the American Association of Law Teachers. He has received many awards and prizes for his work, including from the International Corporate Governance Network, the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute, the European Corporate Governance Institute, and the Wharton School.

Bebchuk has been a frequent contributor to policy-making, practice, and public debate. He has participated in hearings and roundtables before the Senate Finance Committee, the Senate Banking Committee, the House of Representatives Committee of Financial Services, and the SEC; has authored numerous op-ed pieces, including in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Times; has advised governmental bodies, such as the Special Master on TARP executive compensation, and publicly traded firms; has served on the board of directors of OJSC MMC Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium; and he currently serves as an advisor to the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement of Corporate Law and as a Senior Advisor to Dimensional Fund Advisors. During 2011-2014, he directed a shareholder rights clinical project that represented public pension funds and charitable organizations in bringing about board declassifications at about 100 S&P 500 and Fortune 500 companies. Bebchuk was included in the list of the “100 most influential players in corporate governance” of Directorship, the “100 most influential people in finance” of Treasury & Risk Management, and the list of top 10 ”governance stars” of Global Proxy Watch.

Professor Lucian Bebchuk’s Biographical Information (harvard.edu)

Stephen Davis, USA

Stephen Davis, Ph.D. is a senior fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance  and was founding chair of the Oversight Committee overseeing the global proxy voting industry’s Best Practices Principles for Shareholder Voting Research. He co-chairs the Advisory Board of Hawkamah, the corporate governance institute based in the UAE; served on the founding supervisory board of Stewardship Professionals e.V. (StePs); and is a co-founder of the Capital+Constitution project sponsored by the Brookings Institution and States United Democracy Center.

Davis pioneered the field of international corporate governance in 1989 when he founded the Global Shareholder Services unit at the IRRC, in Washington, DC. His Shareholder Rights Abroad: A Handbook for the Global Investor (1989) was the first study comparing corporate governance practices in top markets. Davis has been a nonresident senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, where he co-directed the World Forum on Governance; a senior advisor on governance at Teneo; and outside advisor to the Nissan Special Committee on Improving Governance. From 2007-2012 he was executive director of the Yale School of Management’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance and Lecturer on the SOM faculty. Davis is co-author of What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It (Yale University Press, 2016), an Amazon bestseller in the US and UK among books on financial services, and The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), named by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Australian Financial Review as one of the best business books of 2006. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Group on Active Investor Stewardship.

US SEC Chair Mary Schapiro named Davis to the Commission’s Investor Advisory Committee, and chair of its Investor as Owner Subcommittee. He has been nonexecutive chair of the board of Hermes EOS, the shareowner engagement arm of Hermes Pensions Management, the UK’s largest retirement fund, and a trustee of ShareAction, the London-based NGO focused on institutional investor accountability. Davis is a co-founder of many institutions that now comprise the global corporate governance architecture including the International Corporate Governance Network, the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, Chairmen’s Forums in North America and South Africa, the Conference of Fund Leaders, the (US) Systemic Risk Council, GMI Ratings (now part of MSCI), and Global Proxy Watch newsletter, for more than 25 years the prime industry resource for ESG insights worldwide.

Stephen M. Davis - Program on Corporate Governance (harvard.edu)

Margaret (Peggy) Foran, USA

Ms. Foran is Chief Governance Officer, Senior Vice President and Corporate Secretary of Prudential Financial, Inc.   

She has been a corporate governance leader throughout her career at Sara Lee Corporation, Pfizer, Inc. and J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc.   Ms. Foran is a director on the board of Orion Group Holdings, Inc. and serves on its Compensation and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committees.  From December 2010 through May 2020, Ms. Foran served on the Board of Directors of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation.  During her Board tenure, Ms. Foran served as Chairperson of its Sustainability and Shareholder Engagement Committee, Compensation Committee and Governance Committee. Ms. Foran previously served on the Board of Directors of The MONY Group and MONY Life Insurance Company.

 Her proactive shareholder outreach and thought leadership on key governance issues has earned her global recognition as a leader in corporate governance.  She has been recognized as one of the Most Influential People in Corporate Governance by Directorship Magazine for five consecutive years.  In 2011, she was identified by Treasury and Risk Magazine as one of the Most Influential People in Finance.  In 2013, Corporate Secretary Magazine named Ms. Foran “Governance Professional of the Year”.  In 2015, Ms. Foran received both the Linda Quinn Lifetime Achievement Award from TheCorporateCounsel.net, and Corporate Secretary Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Ms. Foran currently serves as an active member of many influential advisory boards including,   co-chair on the Board of Directors of the Council of Institutional Investors, member of Board of Trustees of the American College of Governance Counsel, liaison to the American Bar Association’s Commission on Diversity and the Corporate Law Committee, Catalyst’s Advisory Board, the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance’s Advisory Board, NACD’s Nominating and Governance Committee Chair Advisory Council, the Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) Stakeholders’ Advisory Panel and Cybersecurity Advisory Panel, the International Integrated Reporting Council, the International Corporate Governance Network’s Corporate Risk Oversight Committee, and, the Society for Corporate Governance’s Environmental & Social Working Group, Executive Director of Prudential’s Sustainability Council, and Executive Sponsor of Prudential’s ADAPT initiative.

Ms. Foran received her B.A., magna cum laude, and J. D. degrees from the University of Notre Dame.  She is admitted to the New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (In-house) Bars.  

Margaret “Peggy” Foran (americanbar.org)

Jon Lukomnic, USA

 Forbes calls Sinclair Capital LLC founder Jon Lukomnik “one of the pioneers of modern corporate governance”. He has consulted to institutional investors with aggregate assets of $1 trillion and has himself been the fiduciary for assets of more than $100 billion.

He is a member of the Deloitte Audit Quality Advisory Committee, the Standing Advisory Group of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and the Board of Trustees of the Van Eck family of US mutual funds, insurance trusts and European UCITs. He is also a senior fellow for the High Meadows Institute.

Jon has served as investment advisor for New York City’s pension funds, was the executive director of the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute, and has been a director for public companies, private companies, not-for-profit corporations and litigation trusts. He was a member of the official creditors committee which rehabilitated WorldCom following its fraud and bankruptcy,

Jon has published 200 articles in academic and practitioner journals. His most recent book is What They Do with Your Money. His previous book, The New Capitalists, was a Financial Times pick of the year.

The International Corporate Governance Network awarded Jon its Excellence in Corporate Governance Prize, the Director and Chief Risk Officers honored him with its inaugural “Exemplar” award and the National Association of Corporate Directors (USA) has three times named him one of the 100 most influential people in American corporate governance. Other awards include recognition by Ethishpere Magazine and Global Proxy Watch.

Sinclair Capital, L.L.C. | About Our Firm

Nell Minow, USA

Nell Minow is Vice Chair of ValueEdge Advisors. She was Co-founder and Director of GMI Ratings from 2010 to 2014, and was Editor and Co-founder of its predecessor firm, The Corporate Library, from 2000 to 2010. Prior to co-founding The Corporate Library, Ms. Minow was a Principal of Lens, a $100 million investment firm that took positions in underperforming companies and used shareholder activism to increase their value.

Her other professional experience includes serving as a Principal of Lens Investment Management, as President of Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc., and as an attorney at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Department of Justice. Ms. Minow was named one of the 30 most influential investors of 2002 by Smart Money magazine and, in 2003, was dubbed “the queen of good corporate governance” by Business Week online. In 2007 she was named as one of the 20 most influential people in corporate governance. In 2008 she was the sole recipient of the International Corporate Governance Network award for exceptional achievement in the field of corporate governance.

She has authored over 200 articles and co-authored three books on corporate governance with Robert A.G. Monks, most recently the 5th edition of an MBA textbook titled Corporate Governance, published in 2011. Ms. Minow is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Chicago Law School.

Nell Minow – ValueEdge Advisors