Why the governance framework designed to protect shareholders so often fails them
There is a pattern Regan McGee has watched repeat itself across industries, company sizes, and market cycles. A business reaches a certain scale. The founding hunger fades. A professional management layer arrives. The board fills with credentialed names who attend meetings, approve budgets, and collect fees. Shareholder returns flatten. Then, quietly, they begin to erode.
McGee, founder and CEO of Nobul, has spent the better part of two decades working across capital markets, private equity, and technology. That experience has produced a view on corporate governance that most governance commentators would rather not engage with directly: the framework that is supposed to protect shareholders is often the very thing that guarantees their mediocrity.
“I think complacency is the silent killer,” McGee says. “It just takes a long time for the market to recognize it.”
The Complacency Premium
Research from Bain & Company found that founder-led S&P 500 companies performed 3.1 times better than all other S&P 500 companies over the 25-year period from 1990 to 2014.
That is not a marginal difference. That is a fundamentally different outcome for the people who own the shares.
The companies producing those returns include Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Dell, which are precisely the ones that conventional governance frameworks have flagged most often for concentrated control, founders who resist ceding authority, and compensation structures that draw scrutiny. But by the metric that actually matters to the people who own the shares, they have been transformational.
A study by Professor Rüdiger Fahlenbrach of the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne found that an investment strategy tracking founder-CEO firms from 1993 to 2002 would have earned a benchmark-adjusted return of 8.3% annually. After controlling for firm size, industry, and other variables, the abnormal outperformance held at 4.4% annually. The research also found that founder-CEO firms consistently outinvested their peers in R&D and capital expenditure.
Taken together, the data points to the same conclusion: the governance structures often celebrated by proxy advisors and institutional consultants don’t necessarily correlate with the best shareholder outcomes.
What distinguishes the outperforming companies is not luck or sector tailwinds alone. It is, as McGee describes it, a culture of hunger. A refusal to treat existing scale as a destination rather than a starting point. A willingness to make bold, sometimes uncomfortable decisions that a committee-driven board may have voted down.
“Once you get into so-called good governance,” McGee observes, “you’re going to perform at the same as the market, unfortunately.”
When Compensation Structure Isn’t Tied to Results
Before examining how boards fail quietly, it is worth examining a case where the failure was structural and precise.
McGee recalled a compensation arrangement where the incentive to underperform was not a side effect but a feature.
The CEO made himself the biggest shareholder in the company,” he explained. “The company had actually created his comps package so that the more he lowered the stock price, the more the company would control. He was actually incentivized to drive the stock price down.”
Pause on that for a moment. This was not a misaligned incentive that slipped through a governance gap. It was a structure that was reviewed, approved, and put in place by a board with full access to the terms. The CEO was not merely failing to grow shareholder value. He was being paid to shrink it. The board that existed to prevent exactly that outcome had instead encoded it into his contract.
The shareholders in this company woke up every day owning shares in a business whose leadership had a direct financial interest in those shares being worth less tomorrow than they were today. The board knew this. The compensation committee signed off on it. And the governance framework that was supposed to catch arrangements like this did not catch it. The boxes were checked, the committees were functioning, and nothing in the formal structure required anyone to ask whether the incentives actually pointed in the right direction.
That is not a governance failure in the abstract. It is a precise, documented betrayal of the people the board existed to protect.
How Boards Fail Without Anyone Noticing
The more insidious problem, in McGee’s view, is not the dramatic governance failure. It is the slow, entirely unremarkable kind that never makes headlines because nothing obviously wrong has occurred.
McGee identified a consistent set of early warning signs. The first: board members who confuse their own importance with actual value creation. Directors who treat their seats as status rather than responsibility.
The second is the rubber-stamp dynamic that emerges when boards defer entirely to advisors rather than applying independent judgment. The scale of that deference is significant: research published by Stanford’s Corporate Governance Research Initiative notes that a negative recommendation from proxy advisory firm ISS on a management proposal can sway as much as 20% of the vote on a given proposal.
But consider what that influence looks like when applied to a situation like the one McGee described above. A board presides over a company whose stock falls more than 99%. Management extracts millions in above-market compensation over the same period. The CEO’s incentive structure is explicitly designed to reward share price destruction. The assets of the company are systematically sold off. All of this is on the public record.
ISS reviewed that record and recommended the reelection of the board anyway, over a qualified turnaround slate that had the legal proxies to win.
That is not a structural critique of proxy advisory influence. It is an example of what that influence costs shareholders when it is applied without adequate judgment. The Stanford stat tells you how much power ISS has over a given vote. This tells you what happens when that power is exercised badly.
What Works
McGee’s prescription is specific and structural. Boards should be evaluated on what they produce, not on how they look. Executive compensation should be tied directly to total shareholder return over defined periods, not benchmarked to peer compensation regardless of outcomes. That single structural change would eliminate much of the incentive architecture that currently rewards underperformance.
Beyond compensation, he says the cultural standard matters as much as the structural one. The founder-led companies that have defined the modern economy did not get there by following every detail of the governance playbook. They got there by being relentlessly focused on growth, willing to be uncomfortable, and unwilling to let scale become an excuse for standing still. Replicating that culture, or protecting it where it exists, is not a governance question. It is a leadership one.
For McGee, there are clear solutions to the silent killer of complacency. Tie pay to outcomes. Put builders in the room. Keep the hunger that built the company from being managed away by the people who arrived after it was already worth protecting. The difficulty is not in understanding it. It is in maintaining it when institutional pressure is pushing in the other direction.
Startups can offer thousands of percents in returns, but the risks are very high at the seed stage.
