Sometimes a seemingly simple hiring decision can rock the status quo. That is precisely what happened last month when the U.S. Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals issued a brief announcement about its appointment of a new president.

Normally, few people outside the orbit of a trade body would care much who occupies its executive office. But the Society’s surprise decision to tap Ken Bertsch as chief executive is of a different magnitude. We think it should be read as a big strategic play to recast relations between public corporations and investors.

Why? First, step back for a moment to appreciate just how polarized the capital markets are right now. Congress adopted the Dodd-Frank Act’s corporate governance sections in the face of ferocious lobbying by the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce on one side, and the Council of Institutional Investors on the other. Lawmakers crafted governance provisions enabling shareholder proxy access, installing universal say-on-pay votes, and killing broker votes in director elections—all in close collaboration with institutional funds led by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). Instead of seeking to cut losses and bury the hatchet, the twin business lobbies seized the first opportunity to hit back, suing the Securities and Exchange Commission over its access rules. Investors were incensed. Today, proxy access has divided the camps in a kind of grueling governance cold war.

And yet, in a striking counterpoint, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro is leading a chorus of voices urging regular, constructive dialogue between boards and investors. In her speech in October to the National Association of Corporate Directors, she was unequivocal: “It is vital that shareholders and board members move beyond the minimum required communications and become truly engaged in the shared pursuit of high-quality governance … It means clear conversations with investors about how the company is governed … Boards can also benefit from access to the ideas and the concerns investors may have.” Schapiro concluded: “Good communications can build credibility with shareholders and potentially enhance corporate strategies.” Indeed, law firms and advisers these days are counseling boards and companies to reach out to their shareowners in ways companies have never done before.

What’s prompting such a cavalcade of advice is, above all, the Dodd-Frank Act. Say-on-pay votes drove directors and investors into dialogue in Britain, and there is little doubt that companies will want to invite dialogue here too to avoid embarrassing ballot defeats (which we’ve already seen once or twice this year). And shareholder proxy access, if it comes to pass, combines with the end of broker voting and the spread of majority decision standards to put directors at troubled firms at real risk of defeat in elections. Dialogue with investors where controversies arise can help avoid such ousters.

Outreach is making more sense for other reasons, too. The BP Gulf disaster, for instance, triggered heightened scrutiny by institutional investors of whether directors effectively oversee environmental risks. Apache, for one, responded by organizing a series of no-holds-barred Q&A sessions for investors on how the firm handles risk management in offshore drilling operations. Now that shareowners having more levers of power at their disposal than ever before, it seems more prudent to some corporations to bring them into the loop than to ignore them.

How then to reconcile these two contradictory but simultaneous forces: one driving boards and investors to opposing barricades and the other forcing them together? Enter the Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals, and its new chief executive Ken Bertsch.

The Society is the collective voice of chief governance officers—often the corporate secretary or general counsel, or sometimes the investor relations officer—who play a curious and vastly underappreciated role in the tripartite balance between directors, executives, and owners. In the United Kingdom, the corporate secretary technically (and even sometimes actually) reports to the board instead of management. U.K. company secretaries are “chartered”—that is, they hold professional qualifications and are expected to adhere to professional standards much the same way lawyers or doctors do in the United States. His or her professional mission includes providing advice to directors that is explicitly “independent” of management.

That’s not exactly the case here. CEOs in the United States usually can hire and fire the governance chief, so at one level there is no ambiguity about the reporting line. Still, the individual often has a unique relationship with directors and serves as the central source of governance advice to the board. As such, the governance chief is often expected to assume the role of a trusted, objective counselor to directors—whose job, of course, is to oversee management—rather than simply to act as the CEO’s advocate. Moreover, investors often see the governance chief as their preferred channel to the board and someone with whom they can express concerns. Such responsibilities put the company secretary in a sensitive, finely balanced, and unique position of having to understand and communicate the interests of all parties to each other. Can you imagine anyone more subject to whipsaw?

There is no mistaking the message the Society is sending by recruiting as its chief a governance expert so conspicuously identified as coming from within the investment community.

Within this context the Society made its choice of a new leader to help define and protect the profession. Had the group done the expected, it would have hired someone from within the members’ own ranks. Instead, it picked Bertsch. Here’s why the choice is telling: Bertsch has never been employed as a corporate secretary or governance professional within a company. Instead, he has a highly respected history of working closely with institutional investors. Bertsch started off in the Investor Responsibility Research Center, the non-profit, impartial governance think tank for investors, which was sold to Institutional Shareholder Services in 2005. From there he joined TIAA-CREF as a director of corporate governance. The fund giant was (and is) one of the nation’s principal champions of investor rights, often advocating a “communications first” approach. Bertsch then moved to Moody’s, founding a unit designed to better protect bondholders by analyzing governance risk at corporations issuing debt. Since 2006 he has served as governance chief at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, voting proxies, leading engagements with companies, and helping traders build governance risk into asset management around the world. (Note: In the interest of full disclosure, Bertsch serves as a trustee of the IRRC Institute, which employs co-author Lukomnik as program director.)

There is no mistaking the message the Society is sending by recruiting as its chief a governance expert so conspicuously identified as coming from within the investment community. The choice is seen by shareowners as an olive branch—a signal that chief governance officers acknowledge the need for constructive dialogue between boards and investors even if some management organizations remain determinedly in attack mode. Funds will also interpret the hire as an audacious offer by the Society to serve as a bridge between otherwise warring parties. Bertsch will have his work cut out for him to fulfill that promise. But if ever a sclerotic status quo needed to be rocked, now is the time.

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