Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism
by Jeff Gramm
View on GoodreadsHedge fund manager and Columbia professor Jeff Gramm's history of shareholder activism, told through eight case studies built around original letters from Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Ross Perot, Carl Icahn, and Daniel Loeb — tracing a century of boardroom conflict over who really controls a public company, and refusing to cast activists as either heroes or villains.
Core ideas
- Gramm's structural insight is that the conflict between owners and managers is not a modern excess but capitalism's oldest running tension — traced from Benjamin Graham's 1926 confrontation with Northern Pipeline (which was sitting on $90/share in bonds while trading at $65) straight through to today's Ackmans and Loebs, with the same agency problem recurring in every era.
- The method is the argument: eight original investor letters — Graham, Buffett, Perot, Icahn, Loeb — used as primary documents, showing how activists actually think about target companies, how they talk to power, and how the register shifts from Graham's politeness to the modern aggressive public attack.
- Writing as a hedge fund manager himself, Gramm refuses the easy verdict: he defends activism's function as a check on entrenched, unaccountable management, but exposes its worst form — hedge funds engineering "stealthy land-grabs" that strip long-term value — leaving the question of who should really control a public company genuinely open.
Published2016
Pages320
ISBN9780062369833
ReadAug 2026
