The Emperor's nightingale

In The Emperor’s Nightingale, Robert Monks, the world’s foremosst shareholder activist, weaves together parables, case studies, and insights from complexity thinking to reveal the true character of the corporation, as it struggles to reconcile the opposing forces of certainty and uncertainty, the predictable and the serendipitous, and short-term profit versus long-term economic value rooted in the social good.

Robert A.G. Monks is founder and principal of D.C.–based LENS Inc., an investment fund that targets companies with poor performance and turns them around through active shareholder participation. He headed the U.S. Department of Labor’s public pension program in the mid-1980s and has served on the board of a dozen publicly held companies.