M&S gets it right (finally) on annual meetings. Others

Last year’s ‘digital-only’ event ruffled feathers. This year’s hybrid meeting fuelled greater attendance and more openness

Archie Norman’s first attempt, a year ago, to reinvent the annual shareholder meeting for the digital age suffered from an enormous error. In designing the event as digital-only – in other words, in telling shareholders not to turn up in person and to tune in online instead – the chair of Marks & Spencer abused the well-established principle that even small investors in a listed company must have the right, once a year, to buttonhole the bosses in the flesh. Directors cannot expect to live virtually; the pandemic is over.

His second effort on Tuesday was vastly improved because it was a genuine hybrid event. Shareholders were free to ignore M&S’s odd advice that they would get “the best experience” by joining online, and 100-plus individuals were in the room at the company’s headquarters in Paddington, west London. The point, let’s hope, has been made: leave it up to the punters to decide how they wish to participate, which is how M&S behaves in its day job as an “omnichannel” retailer.