I attended the shareholders meeting in Indy and the shareholders APPROVED the majority voting resolution along with resolutions on compensation!!! The Teamsters proposed the majority voting resolution…We can expect the Teamsters to forward candidates for the CSX Board in the Near Future…In Other buisness The Director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Commison forwarded questions to CEO Ward about the future of passenger rail…
CSX CEO Ward responded that Passenger Rail does not make money and that congress has the wrong Idea when Amtrak was formed that it would make money…He said that he favored High Speed passenger rail on I-95 in a grade seperated meduim…
Other Shareholders expressed concerns about derailments in the system and possible conflicts of Intrest in interlocking boards of Directors with TIIA-CREF…
All in all I was suprised to see the low turn out at the meeting and the fact that the meeting lasted less then an hour…Now since this was my first railroad stockholders meeting I assume that Pennsyvania Railroad and New York Central Stockholders meeting were big all day affairs in there heyday with perlman and vanderbuilt in charge…anyone got any ups on this?
The shareholders’ meetings I have attended have been pretty anti-climatic. Usually over in an hour, maybe even less. There was one that started at 900am, I thought it started at 930 and by the time I walked in, it was nearly over.
Were you able to mingle with the execs and BOD? I have done that and it is often worth it just to ask detailed questions. After all, it is your company.
I tried to avoid them…I was more intrested in meeting up with the Union guys from the Teamsters… I wanted the know if Jimmy Hoffa is buried in Penn Station[:-^]!! I did meet one man who was a board member and I looked him up after the meeting and found that he sat on like 6 other corperate boards…I get the feeling that the board of directors of the railroad as well as the CEO for that matter is just one part of a huge monster that has a mind of its own…no one person or even a small group of management has control. Its like the railroad has been granted a soul and mind of its own by “G-D” himself for better or worse… The railroads in America are lot like the Catholic Church. As far as the board member I dont know if I want his job because he knows as well the rest of us its going to take a lot more money then CSX got to fix up the railroad to meet our nations trasportation needs even if its just for freight.
The Management of CSX and the American Railroad system is by some sort of consensus of middle management and labor. The boards job is to fine tune the high finance mechisims to keep the railroad capital needs met and the CEO? Well my oponion is that the railroads would do just fine without one.
People want to compare railroads with Microsoft and Bershire Hathaway and Apple Computer…
But those companys were founded on charimatic founders and entraprnuers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who are GURUs in there field…When they pass on who will take there place?
Eventualy with the Teamsters Vote today the railroad workers themselves will run the railroad thru there pension funds and G-D help us All!!
Welcome to the American business model with interlocking Boards of Directors…Directors sitting on the Boards of multiple companies. The practice the has been going on for most of the 20th as well as the 21st centuries. No motions get passed in a Shareholders meeting without the approval of existing management as they control the bulk of the proxies.
Yeah its like that book from the 1980s “Everybodys Buisness”… Now just how would I get the wonderfull job of a jet hopping professional board member? Now here two members of the CSX board are not rich…Elizibeth Baily is a prof at Wharton School of Buisness in Temple and the the other is a Doctor who is middlle class but not bill gates…
What country club should I join here??
I looked at the guidlines to run and it is not as simple as filling out a form and putting your name on the ballot…No you have to be interveiwed by the current board members have a blood test and have your pedigree checked out…[:-^]
Right now, I’m wondering who BNSFreak was on this forum in his previous life. For someone that just joined, he’s awfully comfortable here – not to mention very prolific right out of the gate. And the style seems awfully familiar…
I suspect if full Stockholder information were provided for all US stock companies I think you would find that Pension Funds and Insurance companies hold and run those companies today.
Wharton School of Business (one of top 5 business schools in USA) is at the Univ. of Pennsylvania (Ivy League), not Temple University (decent, but not great, state related university). About the only thing the 2 schools have in common is they are both located in downtown Philadelphia. If Dr. Bailey is a full professor of business at Penn I’d be surprised if she’s not already at least a millionaire, probably multi.