Jonathan Bayer

President & CEO

The Shareholder Activist

TheShareholderActivist.com

Co-founder and Chief Executive of TheShareholderActivist.com™, Jonathan Bayer is responsible for aligning the company, internally and externally, with its mission to provide a platform for responsible shareholder activism. As President, Jonathan oversees management of daily operations, leads the sales team, and engineers business development initiatives.

To lead TheShareholderActivist.com™, Jonathan draws on his diverse experience in the financial services industry—as a trader, a manager, an executive trainer, and a broker-relations specialist. Before launching TheShareholderActivist.com™ in 2011, Jonathan operated Bayer Partners, a privately held securities trading operation based in New York City.

Prior to launching Bayer Partners, Jonathan held a position as an International Money Broker with Tradition Asiel Securities Inc., a leading New York-based broker dealer firm. In that capacity, Jonathan facilitated the trading of overnight Federal Funds, servicing a clientele that included the largest banks and financial institutions in the world.

Economic pressures have forced businesses to become more competitive which has resulted in a crisis in the board room. C-suite executives are torn between making shareholders happy, making management happy, making the board happy and making the market at large happy. Success was once defined purely by capitalism, but retaining that success involved sharing the wealth or rewarding those who were responsible for creating the wealth. Despite shareholder capitalism giving way to managerial capitalism in recent years, the call of the customer and marketplace has become too strong to ignore. Early modern capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century was of the robber baron variety where wealth and politics went hand in hand. Managerial capitalism evolved after the Great Depression and as the American middle class grew, state capitalism became the new mantra for developing economies. Later, shareholder capitalism maximized short term profits for owners and investors, but the resultant discontent among corporate management gave rise to worker capitalism in the 1980s and in the 1990s, entrepreneurial capitalism. The final twist arose in the form of financial capitalism which placed emphasis on the buying and selling of companies for profit. The writer of an article in forbes.com questioned the alignment of c-suite economic fortunes with those of shareholders and noted, “The C-Suite has increasingly run the firm for the benefit of the C-suite, at the expense of shareholders.” This writer also decried top-heavy capitalism because he said that once money became the primary focus, executives became careless; mistakes damaged both the business and the economy, sometimes resulting in self-destruction. Martin Hutchinson wrote in an article in atimes.com that a reduction of estate duty and removal of income tax deductions for home-mortgage interest and charitable donations may create more productive investments. Roger Martin wrote in an article in hbr.com that customer-driven capitalism, where management should be divorced from ownership, is the answer. The writer of the forbes.com article concurred, “Because Customer Capitalism is built on continuous innovation, it is much less vulnerable to changes in the marketplace than other forms of capitalism.” To turn this trend into an advantage for your organization, consider the following. Boards, markets and shareholders all must be answered to. Understand the rise of shareholder activism. Active Shareholders are a good thing. Bring your board, market and shareholders into sync. Authenticity aligns board, market and shareholders.