I posted a note about Anne Simpson going onto the board of the Council of Institutional Investors (CII). Now I see that Anne Sheehan, director of corporate governance at CalSTRS, was elected chairwoman of CII and Michael McCauley, senior officer of investment programs and governance at Florida SBA was elected Treasurer.

Personally, I think CII has improved greatly since Ann Yerger took over as CEO. With Anne Sheehan as Chair and Mike McCauley as Treasurer, I think we can expect even more artful use of resources at CII and more outreach to retail investors.

Both Sheehan and McCauley were early to sign up their funds with ProxyDemocracy.org so that retail shareowners could copy CalSTRS and Florida SBA proxy votes. Sharing some of their resources could help drive more intelligent voting by retail investors who don’t have access to the same information to make decisions, such as which corporate directors are worth voting for. I’d love to see more such initiatives.

For more information, see CII’s press release.

To contact James McRitchie directly, please email jm@corpgov.net