Who is Jeffrey Sonnenfeld?

Well, he's the Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies & Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management at Yale School of Management, of course.

Sonnenfeld is also founder, president, and chief executive officer of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale SOM. There, he trains "roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which [he] started 35 years ago, and [he] speak[s] with business leaders almost every day..." He mentions these august credentials in his current assessment of CEO support for Donald Trump. Reading that interesting piece reminded us to return to another aspect of his efforts with CEOs.

To we activist investors, Sonnenfeld is really just another corporate lackey. He weighed in predictably at not one but two of the most prominent proxy contests in 2024.

At DIS-Trian earlier this year, Sonnenfeld revisited a long-time beef with Trian and its CEO Nelson Peltz. They have argued for many years about activist investing and Trian's performance with its portfolio companies. He refreshed the analysis for this year's DIS proxy contest, lending academic gravitas to an otherwise heated situation. Trian of course can also play this well, awhile ago apparently accusing Sonnenfeld of failing to disclose conflicts between his support for CEOs and company support for his academic work.

We thought we saw the last of Sonnenfeld for now when DIS-Trian wrapped up earlier this year. He surfaced again in the NS-Ancora proxy contest just weeks later. He constructed another exhaustive analysis, praising NS performance and slamming Ancora fund results, with well-placed supporting opinion pieces in Fortune and a rail trade outlet.

We don't have a view about Sonnenfeld's analysis, specifically whether to favor the activist or him at a given company. As with most activist situations, we can likely find some truth in each.

Yet, we can't discern what connection Sonnenfeld has to DIS or NS, if any. Here we echo somewhat that older news report that Trian evidently helped promote, where he indignantly pleads independence. None of the analyses or articles for either DIS or NS disclose a business relationship between each company and him and his institute. Still, for someone who trains a thousand CEOs each year and has done so for decades, we find it a little incredible that he doesn't know both company CEOs at least a little.

For an industriously busy corporate luminary, the work he put into these analyses seems to go far beyond mere academic interest in what to most other bystanders are just fascinating activist situations. Maybe it represents an investment in prospective attendance from DIS or NS executives at future institute classes or events, or a way to burnish his CEO cred even further.

Hence, our notion that he remains a corporate lackey. Sure, a smart, energetic one who analyzes situations well, but still a CEO cheerleader. It's one thing to have a perspective or even a bias - we all do, especially ourselves. It's another to cloak that perspective in academic rigor and independence, which could obscure some current or desired business relationships that influence the analysis and prevent unknowing shareholders from understanding it fully.