While there may be divergent goals between stock holders and employees I think it's incorrect to call all but the worst of them "Conflicts of Interest" (pump and dump situations maybe?). Both the employees and the stockholders rely on their business being successful.

as I posted in another comment:

"I think it's important to consider the rights of the owner as well. If I am a captain on a fishing boat, and I built/paid for the boat, I can then hire fishermen to work on my boat. There are more fishermen than captains, if there is a disagreement between the fishermen and the captain regarding where they should be fishing and it was up to a vote, the fishermen would win.

What incentive does the captain have to invest in his own boat if he has no control over where it goes or how it is run?

Why don't the fisherman go build their own boat if they don't like where the captain is fishing?

The majority in this example microdemocracy is effectively stealing the boat from the owner by using the force of the 'state' to reallocate his resources to themselves."

In this situation it's in everyone's interest to catch more fish. The conflicts will come down to how much of a cut each person gets, who gets the more comfortable cabin etc but these competing goals aren't really conflicts of interest.

The captain is perfectly free to do what he wants how he wants with his property, the boat. His boat is useless without crew. The fishermen crew are not his owned slaves (although there are people working to fix that in the USA in all but name) and if he insists on sailing into hurricanes and killing half the crew, or not providing food/water/fair pay, they're perfectly free to raise hell and refuse to work and encourage everyone else not to work until the captain agrees to reasonable demands. He owns the ship, not the crew. If the captain says "I'm going to be a bit reckless and kill half the crew and pay the other half so low their family starves, but I will make an extra 10%, so you'll like it"... well, no, they won't.

The fisherman can't build their own boat because the captains have added enough rules and regs and .gov payoffs and what boil down to bribes in an effort to reduce competition. Its not a free market and the captains like it that way. No surprise there's a wee bit of backlash. If the captains don't like backlash, try not being a crook, then start complaining.

BTW its OK if the captain is pissed off about people "stealing" his capital even if they aren't. To a first approximation a fair and reasonable deal doesn't require everyone to be perfectly happy, just more or less equally unhappy. I'm sure the union fishermen are about equally pissed off at the captain, seeing as he kills about 2% of them annually by being cheap/risky and half of all captains are of course below the median thus they're jerks to work for.

Sorry to hijack your actual point, but I think the financial investment model of company control does leave something to be desired. In particular, people invest time as well as money into their economic ventures, but this is rarely reflected in the level of control they have. The common retort is that you get paid for your time - but then a lot of people get paid for their money too, often quite handsomely (that's the whole point of investment).

What would be interesting (albeit awkward, perhaps to the point of being unworkable) is if an individual's level of control was equal to the weighted sum of the time and money (or money equivalent) that they had put in. This would mean that early investors would start with a large controlling stake, but it would diminish over time as the effects of the time people spent working at the company started to kick in.

I await the rubbishing of my ideas with moderately bated breath! ;-)