ACTIVIST INVESTORS have some menacing tools of the trade. First comes the phone call, letting a boss know they have a new arrival on the share register. Then there is the slide deck, enumerating all the failings for which the boss is supposedly responsible. Sometimes the body language when predator and prey meet for the first time can be the most unsettling. In 2015, when Trian Partners, one of the biggest activist funds, took a $2.5bn stake in GE, an American conglomerate, its founders, Nelson Peltz and Ed Garden, wore tailored suits—with sneakers—to their first meeting with Jeff Immelt, then GE’s boss. “That note of
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