Hooray for a four-page post-crisis action plan. The Institutional Shareholders’ Committee’s paper on investor engagement is certainly short. Is it to the point?

Even Lord Myners, the ISC’s leading critic, can’t have expected a trade body for four trade bodies to ride into his office on a white charger and slay the dragon of investor complacency with one blow. Codes and consultations are the ISC’s weapons of choice. It’s up to investors, not the ISC, to persuade individual companies to enact the committee’s most striking proposal: to put key committee heads up for an annual vote of confidence and, in extremis, offer chairmen for re-election. Similarly, a mechanism to ease collective activism can’t simply be imposed from above. Most investors would run a mile before giving up their freedom to negotiate bilaterally with company directors.