Robert A.G. Monks
96 Monastery Road
Cape Elizabeth, Maine 04107
Telephone: (207) 741-2795
Fax: (207) 767-1835
Email: ragmonks@ragm.com   Web: www.ragm.com

Robert A.G. Monks is the publisher of http://www.ragm.com, which is focused on the assembly and dissemination of information and opinion about global issues of corporate governance. Mr. Monks is a substantial shareholder in, and advisor to, Trucost, the environmental research company. He is also the founder of Lens Governance Advisors, a law firm that advises on corporate governance in the settlement of shareholder litigation and his principal occupation is the development of ideas harmonizing corporate energies with the long-term interests of Global society. He is also the board chairman of Governance for Owners, for both the London and U.S. based share-ownership services venture formed by former Hermes directors Peter Butler and Steve Brown. Mr. Monks was the Deputy Chairman of Hermes Focus Asset Management in the UK. He also was the founder of Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc., and served as its president from 1985-1990. ISS is now the leading corporate governance consulting firm, advising shareholders with assets in excess of $1 trillion on how to vote their proxies. He founded the investment fund known as LENS, which since 1992 has developed the “institutional activist” mode of investment. The fund has achieved returns in excess of the S&P average throughout its life and has exceeded them by over 100% during the three-year period from 1998 to 2000.

In 1998, in partnership with British Telephone Pension Scheme to promote the same investment principles in the United Kingdom, he founded Hermes LENS Asset Management Company of which he served as Joint Deputy Chairman. This fund also exceeded its index performance standard.  Mr. Monks served as the President of Henley Management College’s Center for Board Effectiveness from 2000 to October 2003.

He is a graduate of Harvard College, Cambridge University and Harvard Law School. He was a partner in a Boston law firm and served as vice president of Gardner Associates, an investment management company. He was president and chief executive officer of C.H.Sprague & Son Company, a coal and oil concern and served as a board member and chairman of the Board of The Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company and the Boston Company. He served as director of the United States Synthetic Fuels Corporation through appointment by President Reagan who also appointed him one of the founding Trustees of the Federal Employees’ Retirement System. He served in the Department of Labor as Administrator of the Office of Pension and Welfare Benefit Programs having jurisdiction over the entire U.S. pension system.

Mr. Monks has served as a member of the board of directors of ten publicly held companies including most recently Tyco International, The Jefferies Group and The Boston Company. He has spoken, written and testified widely on corporate governance matters over the past twenty years. These materials are largely available at www.thecorporatelibrary.com, including the full text of the first of three books, he co-authored with Nell Minow, Power and Accountability (Harper Business, 1991). With Nell Minow, he also wrote Corporate Governance (Blackwell Publishing, 1995), the 3d edition was published October 2003, and Watching the Watchers (Blackwell Publishers, 1996). He wrote The Emperor’s Nightingale (Capstone, April 1998) and The New Global Investors: How Shareowners Can Unlock Sustainable Prosperity Worldwide (Capstone, May 2001). Mr. Monks was also the subject of a biography chronicling the corporate governance movement – A Traitor to His Class  - by Hilary Rosenberg published by Wiley in 1999.  Mr. Monks first novel, Reel and Rout was published by the Brook Street Press, February 2004.

June 2005
 

Jeff Coolidge Appreciation
www.ragm.com/biography/Coolidge.htm

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