We were shareholder activists once. For two years, we conducted an activist campaign at Tejon Ranch, the largest private landowner in California and a publicly traded company. We earned a 13% return — not bad by industry standards — but we failed to change the company much. We wrote about our adventure nearly a year ago in The Atlantic, but as we thought more about our interaction with Tejon Ranch’s managers, we realized there were valuable lessons that we wanted to share with the corporate leaders who are likely to confront the risk of…
