Today’s Financial Times points out that 33 major American publicly traded companies have changed their bylaws to forbid board members from taking incentive payments keyed to the firm’s performance from third parties.

What is this all about?

In a sense, this is an aspect of the question of who really owns a company.  In theory, the owners are the shareholders and the company is run for their benefit.  As a matter of practice, most often the top management of the firm is in control.  It is usually happy with the status quo, and doesn’t typically stint on corporate jets, country club memberships and the like for themselves.

That’s where the board of directors comes in.  The board is elected by the shareholders to run the company.  It does so by appointing professional management to actually do the job, while it supervises, sets compensation and approves major decisions.  Control the board and you control the company.

A time-tested way for activist investors (a term which covers a whole raft of characters, from greenmailers and corporate raiders to more respectable operators who simply want to replace incompetent management) to influence the running of a company is through its board.  Activists often wage proxy battles to get their own nominees elected to the board by shareholder vote.  What better way, activists argue, to motivate such nominees to press for improved corporate performance than to pay them bonuses for achieving it?

The idea of activist investors compensating compliant directors potentially strengthens the activists’ hands in the three-way battle for company influence among:  management (which is virtually always backed 100% by individual shareholders, regardless of performance), institutional investors (who want strong stock performance but who suspect activists) and the activists themselves.

Personally, I think suspicion of activists is often warranted.  After all, look at what Bill Ackman did to JCP.  He erased a third of that firm’s revenues and all of its profits, and then sold his stock quickly–with board approval–at much more favorable prices than ordinary shareholders were able to achieve.  Thanks a lot.

So far, activists haven’t had much success with their pay-for-performance strategy, mainly because the incentivized nominees have lost in their board elections. But managements apparently see this tactic as enough of a threat to be quietly closing the door to it.

To me, the most interesting question is why activists feel the need to motivate their hand-picked board nominees with sizable amounts of cash.  From their rhetoric, it appears the answer is that their successful nominees quickly get used to receiving  hundreds of thousands of dollars for attending a few meetings a year, plus free use of the company’s jet fleet, free lunch   …and find the prospect of living the good life up much less appealing than they did when they were standing outside with their noses pressed up against the glass.