Welcome to the Boardroom Governance Podcast. I’m your host, Evan Epstein. In this episode, I talk with Lydia Beebe, an experienced director, committee chair and board chair on public company and non-profit boards of directors, with a demonstrated history as a C-suite executive. Lydia previously held a number of senior roles at Chevron Corporation, including Corporate Secretary and Chief Governance Officer from 1995 to 2015. She currently serves on the boards of Aemetis, Kansas City Southern Voting Trust and EQT Corporation. Other previous and current director experience includes HCC Insurance Holdings and several private and charitable organizations, including the Council of Institutional Investors, the Society for Corporate Governance, the NACD Northern California Chapter and the Stanford Rock Center for Corporate Governance. In this podcast, we talk about the evolution of the corporate secretary and chief governance officer roles in public corporations, and her personal path to corporate boards. We also address the evolution of corporate governance, shareholder and stakeholder engagement, ESG, board evaluations, board committee structures, and more. If you like this show, please consider subscribing, leaving a review or sharing this podcast on social media. You can find all the show notes on the website boardroom-governance.com and please feel free to subscribe to the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at evanepstein.substack.com
0:00 -- Intro.
1:40 -- Start of interview.
2:25 -- Lydia's "origin story".
3:35 -- On her career at Chevron, particularly as Corporate Secretary and Chief Governance Officer. She was the first woman elected Officer at Chevron.
7:22 -- On board agendas.
10:28 -- On how the Corporate Secretary and Chief Governance Officer roles have evolved in U.S. public corporations.
13:56 -- Her personal path to corporate board memberships.
24:36 -- On the evolution of shareholder engagement in large U.S. public corporations.
29:46 -- Lessons from the Exxon proxy fight with Engine No.1.
32:39 -- On ESG and the anti-ESG trend and the politicization of corporation governance.
36:28 -- On board evaluations.
43:30 -- On board committees.
47:22 -- On the FTX collapse and its lack of a board and governance generally.
49:25 - The books that have greatly influenced her life:
50:11 - Her mentors, and what she learned from them. "You've got to have a board of mentors."
53:34 - Quotes she thinks of often or live her life by. "It's 25% the decision you make and 75% what you make of the decision."
54:10 - An unusual habit or an absurd thing that she loves: She's a big KU Jayhawks fan, plus a Peloton user/fan.
55:37 - The living person she most admires: Volodymyr Zelensky (also Liz Cheney and Henry Kissinger).
Lydia Beebe is a public company corporate director and currently serves as Principal of LIBB Advisors LLC, a corporate governance consulting firm. Lydia previously held a number of senior roles at Chevron Corporation, including Corporate Secretary and Chief Governance Officer, from 1995 to April 2015. She previously was Co-Director of Stanford Institutional Investors’ Forum and Senior Counsel for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati P.C.
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Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License