Boardroom Governance with Evan Epstein

Lydia Beebe: On Corporate Secretaries and the Evolution of Corporate Governance.

Dec 26, 2022

58:22

0:00 -- Intro.

1:40 -- Start of interview.

2:25 -- Lydia's "origin story".

3:35 -- On her career at Chevron, particularly as Corporate Secretary and Chief Governance Officer. She was the first woman elected Officer at Chevron.

7:22 -- On board agendas.

10:28 -- On how the Corporate Secretary and Chief Governance Officer roles have evolved in U.S. public corporations.

13:56 -- Her personal path to corporate board memberships.

[14:36] HCC Insurance Holdings (acquired one year after she joined)
[15:19] Aemitis, a renewable fuels and biochemicals company that commercializes innovative technologies to replace traditional fossil fuels.
[17:05] Kansas City Southern Voting Trust, a cross-border freight railway company.
[19:30] EQT Corporation, a natural gas producer energy company. *She joined the board as part of the dissident slate of shareholder activists.

24:36 -- On the evolution of shareholder engagement in large U.S. public corporations.

29:46 -- Lessons from the Exxon proxy fight with Engine No.1.

32:39 -- On ESG and the anti-ESG trend and the politicization of corporation governance.

36:28 -- On board evaluations.

43:30 -- On board committees.

47:22 -- On the FTX collapse and its lack of a board and governance generally.

49:25 - The books that have greatly influenced her life:

The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, by Eleanor Roosevelt (1961)

50:11 - Her mentors, and what she learned from them. "You've got to have a board of mentors."

53:34 - Quotes she thinks of often or live her life by. "It's 25% the decision you make and 75% what you make of the decision."

54:10 - An unusual habit or an absurd thing that she loves: She's a big KU Jayhawks fan, plus a Peloton user/fan.

55:37 - The living person she most admires: Volodymyr Zelensky (also Liz Cheney and Henry Kissinger).

Lydia Beebe is a public company corporate director and currently serves as Principal of LIBB Advisors LLC, a corporate governance consulting firm. Lydia previously held a number of senior roles at Chevron Corporation, including Corporate Secretary and Chief Governance Officer, from 1995 to April 2015. She previously was Co-Director of Stanford Institutional Investors’ Forum and Senior Counsel for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati P.C.

You can follow Evan on social media at:

Twitter: @evanepstein

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/

Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/

Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

You can follow Evan on social media at:

X: @evanepstein

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/

Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/

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Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License