Pay-Fight Foes Blow Hot Air

Don't expect corporate leaders to have the answer either. Private-equity titans who benefited from this syndrome, ranging from Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman to Bain's Josh Beckenstein, have told me they do not see this corrosive investor impatience diminishing. Last month, reborn governance reform cynics similarly missed their target in addressing such "short-termism" when Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and former Fed chief Alan Greenspan joined conservative academics and business leaders attacking the presumed impact of Sarbanes-Oxley reforms.

Ironically, stepping past the ideology to examine the facts, this legislation had no remote impact on the "short-termism" that the gathering initially intended to address regarding the competitiveness of U.S. markets. Paulson and Greenspan failed to acknowledge the irony that such needed reform would never have happened without their own bold early endorsements five years ago.

Furthermore, the supposed consequent drift of IPOs to foreign financial markets turns out to be a canard as proven in recent studies by Goldman Sachs and Ernst & Young. Global IPOs have always preferred home listings. It's just a concern now that those new foreign-listed firms have gotten larger. Meanwhile, there is no loss of U.S. IPOs to foreign exchanges.

The actual problem solving in current governance matters is not coming from shrill ideological rants and misleading data. Yogi Berra once said, "It was impossible to get a conversation going; everybody was talking too much." Loud grandstanding makes noise but not necessarily progress.