Profile: Lisa Beth Bentini, Best Buy senior corporate counsel

 ‘At my core, I am really a huge corporate governance and securities law geek,’ confesses Lisa Beth Lentini, senior corporate counsel at Best Buy.

Lentini’s job title only begins to hint at her myriad responsibilities; her ever-increasing list of duties reflects the continually evolving role of corporate governance professionals. When she first came to Best Buy in 2006, Lentini thought she would be primarily focused on securities work. ‘But your areas of focus tend to expand exponentially,’ she observes.

Indeed, her scope has widened to include subsidiary and legal entity management, more corporate governance-related duties, and social responsibility and treasury work. She also collaborates, far more frequently than originally anticipated, with the investor relations, public and government relations, and executive compensation groups. Echoing what appears to be an increasingly common sentiment among corporate governance professionals, Lentini remarks, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a typical day. I never know what I’m going to run into when I come into work.’

Lentini cites technology as a significant factor in the evolution of her job function. ‘Corporate governance was a paper-and-pen world for so long, I never anticipated just how much I would be using technology in the course of my role,’ she says.

During her tenure at Best Buy, Lentini has been actively involved in digitizing the company’s governance systems: a web-based legal entity record-keeping system has been implemented, e-proxy has been adopted (the money this saved was used to enhance the IR website) and board portals are now used to communicate with directors.  

Social media, which Lentini predicts will expedite the rate of change in corporate governance, have also altered the governance landscape. Lentini herself is a prolific user of Twitter and assists in the oversight of Best Buy’s ‘Twelp Force’, a group of employees charged with monitoring and responding to Best Buy-related comments on Twitter.

In fact, the group has become so ubiquitous that it has earned itself an entry in the Twitter glossary: ‘Twelp Force – an army of Best Buy’s tech pros’. While Lentini champions the use of social media to increase communication, she does caution her peers ‘to be very, very cognizant of your social media guidelines and ensure they are being regularly taught to everyone.’

Talking it out
Lentini came to Best Buy from the SEC, where she served as attorney adviser in the division of corporation finance. Now that she is on the public side of the regulatory fence, she believes regulators and issuers can improve relations through increased communication. ‘Public companies need to understand that SEC employees are hardworking and doing the best they can,’ she says. Likewise, she would like to see the commission continuing to make concerted outreach efforts to issuers, perhaps engaging public companies through more roundtable discussions.

Lentini calls her move from the SEC to Best Buy’s Minnesota office a ‘leap of faith’. In addition to shifting her career path, she moved halfway across the country to do so. Knowing virtually no one in her newly adopted state, Lentini faced not only the challenges of adjusting to a new community, new role and new company, but also the challenges of balancing that with a nine-month-old son and a husband who was still in Virginia trying to sell their house.

She credits the Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals (the Society) in large part with helping her break into the governance community. ‘The best advice that I got coming out of the SEC and going in-house was to become a member of the Society,’ she says.

Work/life balance
Luckily, Lentini took to life at Best Buy like the proverbial duck to water. ‘People say walking into Best Buy is like drinking from a fire hose,’ she remarks, and it is precisely this energy that she cites as one of her favorite parts of the job. As far as finding that elusive balance between life inside and outside of work goes, Lentini’s recommendation is to ‘take advantage of the ability to work from home, keep your BlackBerry on and tuck your kids in every night.’

In her early years, Lentini, perhaps like many of us, did not imagine that corporate governance lay in her future. There were early indicators of an emerging interest in the markets, however. When Lentini was still in grade school, for example, her father bought his two children several shares and taught them to read the closing prices. She studied economics in college and while in school interned at a brokerage firm and studied for her Series 7 license.

Later, she enrolled in Tulane University’s four-year joint MBA and JD program. Here her interest in capital markets was briefly derailed as she considered a career in maritime law. ‘That lasted about five minutes, until I took a class,’ she laughs. ‘As I started getting into the core coursework, I realized that I really love the corporate stuff – and then I figured out that I really, really love the SEC stuff.’  

If Lentini were not Best Buy’s senior corporate counsel, her ideal alternative career would be event planner. She does seem to have a knack for it. Case in point: Lentini’s Mardi Gras-themed wedding in New Orleans, an event so memorable that it was profiled in wedding magazine The Knot. Festivities included a jazz reception and a parade through the French Quarter, led by Lentini herself.

Her ability to throw a great party aside, Lentini is sincere in her passion for her job. ‘This is probably one of the most interesting times to be involved in corporate governance,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen such dramatic changes in both behavior and expectations anywhere else.’

Lentini is equally enthusiastic about what the future of corporate governance holds. When asked to make a few predictions for the next five years, she imagines governance professionals and regulators taking a more holistic look at disclosure: whatever is no longer relevant will be eliminated and, she hopes, we will no longer be ‘drowning in paper’.

She also envisions CSR and governance merging into a single, indivisible unit, and she sees director elections not only increasing in visibility, but also resembling political campaigns. Regardless of how her predictions pan out, Lentini is sure of one thing: ‘If you’re afraid of change, run for the hills.’