I thought of starting a thread where community members can bring their own methods and case examples of how they have been able to influence the actions of the management of companies they own.
I was inspired by the topic by @Mustathmir’s commendable and forceful challenge to Nokia’s management regarding the company’s net cash target level. I thought that perhaps others also have good methods up their sleeve that could be harnessed for broader community use.
I didn’t find another thread on the topic, at least with a quick glance.
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Greetings, for background, I believe Nokia under Lundmark’s leadership has done almost everything right from a business perspective, but stock price appreciation has essentially been missing during his 2.5+ year tenure as CEO. In my opinion, a new Capital Markets Day was needed to build confidence and demonstrate concretely what Nokia’s growth targets are. This strategy progress update was provided after the Q4 interim report, which was a good thing.
However, I don’t think Nokia had yet turned every stone to create the conditions for the stock price to rise and for shareholders to feel that owning Nokia is worthwhile. That’s why in early February, I made three initiatives to Nokia (a target level for net cash, a minimum target for dividends, and share buybacks as part of the annual use of retained earnings), of which the net cash target was realized such that in the future it will be 10-15% of Nokia’s sales, while net cash is currently 19%, which at current levels would mean 1-2.25 billion in distributable funds. The other two initiatives will likely also receive attention as Nokia promised to present them to the AGM as shareholder questions to Nokia (I cannot attend myself as I don’t live in Finland).
For your information, here are the initiatives and the response I received:
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Thanks for the background and for linking the post itself. And my apologies for the unprompted and unexpected name-dropping.
I also want to admit my own shortcomings. For some reason, I didn’t feel that the means of influence you described were really within the reach of a retail investor.
Your account, however, made me think differently. Anyone can at least try to exert influence by demanding answers at an annual general meeting. For others, this was probably obvious, but for me, it took a concrete example to realize it.
Influencing management directly through questions is clearly possible, provided you can argue your position strongly and frame your questions sharply.
Since my realization, I’ve started to suspect that there are likely other means of influence that a beginner like myself doesn’t yet understand. And there are surely others who haven’t woken up to the possibility yet. So, why not ask the forum for more examples? The best way to learn is to ask those wiser than yourself. 
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