LESSONS FOR THE DISNEY BOARD: 2/4: Fearless: Wilma Soss and America's Forgotten Investor Movement by Robert E. Wright (Author), Janice Traflet (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
by Robert E. Wright (Author), Janice Traflet (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Americas-Forgotten-Investor-Movement/dp/1958682306
Shareholder activist Wilma Soss rocketed to fame in the 1950s fighting for the rights of the individual investor. But over the years, her legacy was almost forgotten.
Based on archival documents, this is the true story of how a disparate group of activist investors-from a PR star to a Holocaust survivor-found each other and became the advocates Fortune 500 management loved to hate.
Soss and her band of activists, including the incomparable Evelyn Y. Davis, leveraged the media to promote the rights of small shareholders. The idea was simple: buy one share of stock to gain access to shareholder meetings and remind management whom they reallyserve.
These "corporate gadflies" were determined to speak their minds, even if it meant bringing their own megaphones or being dragged out of public meetings. But their message was undeniable, and ultimately changed corporate America for the better. Increased opportunities in the workplace, improved shareholder voting rights and greater corporate transparency were just some of the reforms Wilma Soss and her Federation kicked off in the post-war era.
If you're looking for the intellectual heritage of 2021's WallStreetBets phenomenon or the reason Fearless Girl stands as a symbol of American optimism today, look no further than the life, times and efforts of the fearless shareholder activist, Wilma Soss.
1957 DISNEYLAND
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John |
| 0:05.4 | John Dashler. |
| 0:06.6 | Fearless is the book Will must Soss and America's forgotten investor movement, |
| 0:11.5 | Janice Trafflet, and Robert Wright are the authors. I'm speaking to the professor. |
| 0:17.0 | It is now November 1953. Wilma has been an activist, a gadfly, all these years since she first spoke up against the U.S. |
| 0:25.2 | Steel's presumptions in 1947. |
| 0:29.3 | However, it's the Bilasco Theater. |
| 0:31.8 | The director is George Kaufman. |
| 0:33.4 | You don't get more famous than this. |
| 0:35.6 | And the play is The Solid Gold Cadillac. |
| 0:38.6 | What is that, Professor? |
| 0:40.4 | So the Solid Gold Cadillac is a play that has resounding success on Broadway, and the play is about a semi-fictional character named Laura Partridge that actually seems to be modeled very heavily on the real life Wilma Sauce. |
| 0:57.4 | And in the play, the Laura Parton and in the script, Laura Partridge in the script. |
| 1:03.0 | Laura Partridge is a small share owner |
| 1:05.0 | in a company called General Products. |
| 1:08.0 | And she only owns 10 shares, but she goes to a shareholder meeting |
| 1:12.0 | to voice her concerns, gets rebuffed, and the company |
| 1:17.2 | winds up making her their first ever directors of shareholder relations in an effort actually to kind of placate her. |
| 1:25.0 | But the joke winds up being on general products because DP doesn't realize that she's |
| 1:30.8 | going to take this role seriously and cultivate small investors like herself |
| 1:36.1 | to wind up being a force to contend with. And so Wilma Sauce was claimed in many times that the film was based on her and the and no one ever refuted her and if you watch the film the the play that which later was made into a movie. You can see many parallels between Wilma |
| 1:57.4 | Sauce and Laura Partridge and it's a movie well worth well worth watching and you can buy the script to the play as well. |
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