Activist investors are both greening and greying

ACTIVIST INVESTORSGEGEGE have some menacing tools of the trade. First comes the phone call, letting a boss know they have a new arrival on the share register. Then there is the slide deck, enumerating all the failings for which the boss is supposedly responsible. Sometimes the body language when predator and prey meet for the first time can be the most unsettling. In 2015, when Trian Partners, one of the biggest activist funds, took a $2.5bn stake in , an American conglomerate, its founders, Nelson Peltz and Ed Garden, wore tailored suits—with sneakers—to their first meeting with Jeff Immelt, then ’s boss. “That note of informality amplified their power,” two reporters wrote in a recent book, “Lights Out”. “Amid the fine art displayed [at ’s headquarters], the sneakers were a reminder of their sovereignty.”It is easy to be cynical about such calculated displays of power. Some deride shareholder activism as a game of smoke and mirrors, in which hedge-fund bombasts loudly call for executives to do what they were going to do anyway, and executives use activists as cover for unpopular measures such as asset sales and job cuts.