Ralph Whitworth
Managing member
Relational Investors
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Ralph Whitworth doesn't just sit on corporate boards, he shakes them.
His $1.7 billion Relational Investors fund buys 3 to 10 percent of companies that underperform their peers. Whitworth and his team look out-of-favor companies with mature cash flow and search for ways to improve performance. Using the size of its stake as leverage, Relational communicates with all stakeholders to generate the pressure needed to make those changes.
Relational's style and success has garnered at least one high-profile client, the California Public Employees' Retirement System,which had invested $750 million in Whitworth's fund through June of last year.
Whitworth currently sits on three boards: Mattel; Waste Management, where Whitworth was chairman for three months in 1999; and Apria Healthcare Group, whose board he has chaired since April 1998. Other Relational stocks as of May included Nuevo Energy, ConAgra, Aetna and The Walt Disney Co.
Although Whitworth shies away from calling Relational a corporate governance fund -- he views it simply as a performance fund that's not afraid to make noise with its stakes -- he has a long history of shareholder activism.
He was president of United Shareholders Association from its founding in 1986 until its dissolution in 1994. In 1989 he pushed a petition for rulemaking which resulted in a 1992 overhaul of the SEC's shareholder communication and compensation disclosure rules.
And he's no stranger to executive work. Whitworth was president of development at United Thermal from 1989 to 1992, when the company the largest operator of district heating and cooling systems in the United States. He worked at the firm of legendary corporate raider T. Boone Pickens from 1985 to 1988, when Whitworth was assistant to the general partner at Pickens' Mesa Limited Partnership.
Since 1997, Whitworth has been a principal in Batchelder & Partners, a financial advisory firm. A graduate of Georgetown University's law school, Whitworth worked on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee staff of Sen. Paul Laxalt from 1981 to 1984.
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