A new breed of investors promises to take corporate boardrooms to task. Or, is it just a flight of fancy for some ambitious big-ticket investors?

On June 18 when Yahoo! announced the exit of its CEO Terry Semel along with some other top officials it looked like any other instance of a high-profile exit; however it was not. The change in leadership was not a routine transition; rather it was a forced event courtesy shareholder activism a new phenomenon. One man spearheading the shareholder revolt is Eric Jackson who influenced Yahoo! investors into challenging the leadership of Semel and Yahoo!'s board whom they felt were not doing enough to pose any significant challenge to market leader and arch rival Google. This was however not the first time the corporate boardroom in America was witnessing this kind of activism from shareholders. In the last seven years or so post-Enron angry shareholders have targeted erring corporates and their top brass for failing to create shareholder wealth. ABN AMRO Bank Vodafone Motorola Home Depot ExxonMobil and Kraft Foods are some of the corporate biggies which are feeling the ire of irate investors. Who could be next? But alarmingly the trend is growing faster adding to the concern that it could be a ploy used by some deep-pocketed individual investors to steal the limelight.

The phenomenon however is not quite new even though it appears so. Long ago during the 1970s religious investors formed a shareholder coalition called the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and started using the shareholder proposal process as a way of working for peace and social justice according to an organization called Friends of the Earth based in the US. This group of investors began organizing and filing resolutions on South African apartheid community economic development and global finance environment equality international issues health and militarism. By the mid-1980s the focus shifted to the issue of corporate governance. In 1985 a group of investors came forward to set up the Council for Institutional Investors (CII) with the objective of protecting the financial interests of its member investors and pension funds. Four years later in 1989 in another move to fight corporate excesses—this time towards in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster which was also one of the biggest man-made environmental disasters ever to occur—investors and environmentalists banded together to form the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) which was built around elements of environmental disclosure.

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