The Boardroom Barometer: leadership signals that move markets

Leadership moves markets. When a board makes an appointment, an executive speaks publicly, or management faces controversy, investors take notice. And stock prices often follow.

The challenge is keeping track of it all. With thousands of news articles and earnings transcripts published daily, it's impossible to monitor every mention manually. Directors might go by different names, serve on multiple boards, or come up in discussions that seem unrelated to their companies. Trying to catch everything by hand is both exhausting and unreliable.

That's where a systematic approach pays off. Instead of playing catch-up with scattered news, you can build a consistent workflow that captures leadership activity as it happens. This transforms random mentions into organized intelligence you can actually use, whether you're analyzing corporate governance, monitoring risks, or making investment decisions.

See this workflow in action on GitHub

Bigdata.com workflow overview

Using the Bigdata API, we’ve developed a systematic workflow to help analysts track board and executive activity efficiently. By combining entity-based search with multi-mode monitoring, we can capture both precise and broad mentions across news, filings, and transcripts, creating a consistent picture of management visibility over time.

The workflow works as follows:

1. Define scope - Identify the individual(s), company associations, document types (e.g., news, filings), and time periods to monitor.
2. Search across modes

• Strict mode – requires person and company to co-occur (high precision).
• Relaxed mode – searches name variations (high recall).
• Relaxed post mode – broader search with company filtering applied afterward (balanced).

1. Classify theme - Organize results into management integrity signals (misconduct, reputation, innovations) and board governance themes (appointments, resignations, composition).

3. Compare and track - Aggregate results by time period to spot attention peaks, by theme to identify risks or opportunities, and by source to see coverage patterns.

4. Export results - Create structured outputs for reporting, dashboards, or further review.

A leadership story: Emmanuel Faber at Danone

In late 2020, Emmanuel Faber, CEO and Chairman of Danone, was in the spotlight as the company pursued strategic changes. Early coverage highlighted his sustainability initiatives and long-term vision, with subtle hints of internal tension.

By Q1 2021, our strict monitoring surfaced board-focused articles discussing executive oversight and governance debates, revealing where Danone’s leadership decisions were most scrutinized. Relaxed monitoring captured broader coverage of Faber’s reputation and leadership style, while relaxed post monitoring traced mentions in wider industry discussions, showing how his visibility extended beyond Danone.

Over time, the workflow highlighted spikes in coverage that matched board debates and leadership changes. By organizing scattered media mentions into a clear story, analysts could track Faber’s influence and the evolving governance dynamics at Danone.

Who it helps

• Governance analysts tracking board and executive activity
• Portfolio managers assessing leadership-related risk
• Stewardship and ESG teams evaluating management oversight
• Strategy teams monitoring executive visibility across media

Practical applications

• Governance risk monitoring: Track controversies or integrity challenges.
• Reputation analysis: Observe how management is perceived in trusted sources.
• Board oversight: Follow appointments, resignations, and composition changes.
• Engagement preparation: Support stewardship teams with evidence-based insights before discussions.

Technical stack

• Bigdata API — access to news, filings, and transcripts at scale
• bigdata-research-tools — for thematic labeling, scoring, and visualization a Python toolkit for running scalable financial research workflows on top of the Bigdata API (e.g., thematic labeling, scoring, visualization).
• LLMs (e.g. GPT-4o-mini) — for classifying mentions into governance and management themes

Interested in building your own?

Within hours, you can go from scattered news articles and filings to structured insights on board and executive activity. Check out the Boardroom Monitoring Cookbook to build your own workflow. You can access the full framework, example workflows, and code on GitHub.