Darden Restaurants, Inc. DRI
The three reasons
- 1
Darden underperformed direct peers by ~300% over 5 years under current Board
- 2
Operational plan adds $215-$326M EBITDA — just 3.8% of current cost pool
- 3
Sum-of-parts shows $67-$86 per share vs. $48 — before any Olive Garden turnaround
Primary demands
- Elect Starboard's full slate of 12 director nominees to replace the entire Darden Board
- Appoint a new transformational CEO (Clarence Otis is retiring)
- Implement a company-wide margin improvement plan targeting $215-$326M of annual EBITDA uplift
- Execute a turnaround of Olive Garden focused on authenticity, quality, and value
- Separate Darden's real estate (PropCo/OpCo) to unlock ~$1B of shareholder value
- Spin off the Specialty Restaurant Group (SRG)
- Launch an international and domestic franchising program
- Align executive compensation with shareholder returns and protect the investment-grade rating and dividend
KPIs cited
Pattern membership
Where this document fits across the library's 12 rhetorical / structural patterns.
Notable slides (8)
Notes
One of the most famous activist decks in history — 294 pages, widely cited (often called the 'how to run Olive Garden' deck). Opens with a founder quote from Bill Darden to frame the Board as betrayers of the founder's legacy ('You just have to have good people...'). SCQA structure is clean: Why Darden is compelling / Our plan / Our priorities appears both on slide 5 and slide 286 as bookends. Features waterfall EBITDA bridge (p.9), full sum-of-parts table (p.12), annotated stock price chart tying every announcement to price move (p.26), peer-gap KPI arrows (p.29), and detailed nominee bios with logo-farms (pp.287-288). Appendix of analyst quotes (pp.290-293) is used as third-party validation of the thesis. Tone is adversarial — 'destroyed shareholder value', 'fire sale price', 'appalling corporate governance'. No direct Otis quote contradiction but the campaign-timeline slide (p.26) functions as a promise-vs-outcome device.