Robert Monks

Robert Monks is widely credited with helping create the modern corporate governance movement. He co-founded Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and later Lens Investments, an activist fund that took concentrated positions and engaged companies on governance. He ran a high-profile proxy campaign against Sears Roebuck in 1991, putting his own name on the ballot for the board. His books, including "Power and Accountability" and "Corporate Governance" (with Nell Minow), helped define the field. Monks advocated for pension fund trustees to take their governance responsibilities seriously decades before this became standard. His broader intellectual contribution — arguing that institutional shareholders who hold companies passively are implicitly ratifying management decisions that destroy value — helped shift the intellectual framework through which pension funds and endowments think about their fiduciary duties as large long-term owners of public companies.