Quotes About Shareholders

#1. I'm the C.E.O., nominated by the shareholders. If they're not happy, I have to take the consequences.

Carlos Ghosn

#2. I am always asking myself how I can improve the lives of my customers, my colleagues, my shareholders, my family and my friends.

Martha Stewart

#3. A lot of deals are done or not done because chief executives are not fully aligned to shareholders.

Ivan Glasenberg

#4. Enduring great companies don't exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.

James C. Collins

#5. The ultimate arbiters of the models of banking and the management of banking are the investors. It's the shareholders.

Bob Diamond

#6. Companies do not commit crimes; only their agents do. And while a company might get the benefit of some such crimes, prosecuting the company would inevitably punish, directly or indirectly, the many employees and shareholders who were totally innocent.

Jed S. Rakoff

#7. I don't feel I'm at liberty to speak about the actions of any one CEO. That's not fair; given CEOs have duties to their shareholders.

Kenneth C. Griffin

#8. I am very confident that we will be able to convince all the stakeholders - the shareholders, the governments and the employees, that this is in their best interests.

Lakshmi Mittal

#9. People invest in companies in order to get a share of the profit that company will make. If the Government increases its share of the profits, potential profits, at the expense of the owners of the company, the shareholders, then that makes investment in that company less attractive.

Malcolm Turnbull

#10. If you punish the banks, all you are doing is reducing the banks' capital, which you want to increase, and punishing shareholders, who have done nothing wrong.

Nigel Lawson

#11. It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management.

Peter Schiff

#12. Shareholders share in the downside and not necessarily in the upside; that's the whole story.

John Gutfreund

#13. Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.

Peter Drucker

#14. The main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. "When things go wrong it's their problem,

Michael Lewis

#15. Charities must treat donors as if they were shareholders.

Arpad Busson

#16. For many of our shareholders, our stock is all they own, and we're acutely aware of that. Our culture [of conservatism] runs pretty deep.

Charlie Munger

#17. Dhirubhai will go one day. But Reliance's employees and shareholders will keep it afloat. Reliance is now a concept in which the Ambanis have become irrelevant.

Dhirubhai Ambani

#18. With the acquisition of 50% of Todito, TV Azteca is getting on a very fast train. Todito will allow TV Azteca to create value for its shareholders and promote its television content on the Internet.

Ricardo Salinas Pliego

#19. Companies, to date, have often used the excuse that they are only beholden to their shareholders, but we need shareholders to think of themselves as stakeholders in the well being of society as well.

Simon Mainwaring

#20. It is very clear that the present system of innovation for medicines is very inefficient and really somewhat corrupt. It benefits shareholders over patients; it produces for the rich markets and not for the poor and does not produce for minority diseases.

John Sulston

#21. I definitely have a shareholders' perspective. I'm not doing that altruistically. I'm doing that because it's in my own self interest to do it. I think that's good for my other shareholders because they go along with me: If I do well for myself, then they do well for themselves.

Harold Simmons

#22. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Michael Dell had declared he had so little faith in an Apple recovery that if he were Jobs, he'd "shut Apple down and give the money back to the shareholders.

Fred Vogelstein

#23. The board is currently undertaking what could be its most important task, ... We are confident that we're going to make a choice that is in the best interest of the company, shareholders and others.

George J. Mitchell

#24. Why not stakeholder action? There's no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.

Noam Chomsky

#25. Money managers have to account for their actions to their shareholders, which means they have an undue fear of underperformance. We invest only our own money. Our investments are driven by optimism, not fear.

Richard Chandler

#26. Companies that grow for the sake of growth or that expand into areas outside their core business strategy often stumble. On the other hand, companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.

Jamie Dimon

#27. A corporation's responsibility is to the shareholders, not its retirees and employees. Companies are doing everything they can to get rid of pension plans and they will succeed.

Ben Stein

#28. Our laws demand that a corporation have a fiduciary responsibility with shareholders to maximize profits. They are legally required to make as much money as possible, any way possible within 'the law.'

Michael Moore

#29. The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.

James Surowiecki

#30. Management has failed miserably at creating increased value for shareholders. Indeed, despite some recent short-term gains, which actually only put us back where we were eight years ago, they have been devaluing our assets, turning a unique institution into just another entertainment company.

Roy O. Disney

#31. Legacy doesn't mean a lot because once you have left, even if you are one of the biggest individual shareholders it only means [a small amount of influence]. But it's something I'm very pleased about.

Maurice Levy

#32. The pharmaceutical drug industry is a half-trillion dollar per year global industry, with almost 300 billion dollars in the United States alone. The pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders rely on people to be sick, or else their stocks will plummet. There is no money to be made in health.

Joseph P. Kauffman

#33. I wear two hats. The one is business and increasing my shareholders' value; the other is social responsibility.

Guler Sabanci

#34. They used to ask: "How will this decision that we make today affect our people in the future?" Now we make decisions based on: "How does it affect me, now? How does it affect the next shareholders meeting, three months ahead? How does it affect my next political campaign?"

Jane Goodall

#35. If power lies more and more in the hands of corporations rather than governments, the most effective way to be political is not to cast one's vote at the ballot box, but to do so at the supermarket or at a shareholders' meeting. When provoked, corporations respond.

Noreena Hertz

#36. Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks' managements and shareholders. It's because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all.

Frank Rich

#37. Our first priority should be the people who work for the companies, then the customers, then the shareholders. Because if the staff are motivated then the customers will be happy, and the shareholders will then benefit through the company's success.

Richard Branson

#38. There is strong mentoring of women in the academy. Corporations appear more willing to resist affirmative action to advance women, and boards and shareholders are more tolerant of this approach.

Ruth J. Simmons

#39. I basically believe the medical insurance industry should be nonprofit, not profit-making. There is no way a health reform plan will work when it is implemented by an industry that seeks to return money to shareholders instead of using that money to provide health care.

Dianne Feinstein

#40. Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

Gary Hamel

#41. The evidence seems clear that those business which actively serve their many constitutencies in creative, morally thoughtful ways also, over the long run, serve their shareholders best. Companies do, infact, do well by doing good.

Norman Lear

#42. After watching Taro reach the brink of bankruptcy, seeing their shares delisted from trading, hearing endless false promises about receiving audited financial statements, and witnessing an unchecked drain of company resources, the shareholders have clearly had enough.

Dilip Shanghvi

#43. We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.

Alan Greenspan

#44. If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.

Louis V. Gerstner Jr.

#45. Is management candid with the shareholders?

Warren Buffett

#46. We can collaborate with a Netscape employee or partner who's halfway around the world. We can distribute information and software to customers and shareholders, and get their feedback.

Jim Barksdale

#47. Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

Herb Kelleher

#48. We're all shareholders. These guys below me, they see the CEO taking it easy, it's their money.

Ivan Glasenberg

#49. The total amount paid out in dividends is roughly equal to the amount lost in trading and investment advice, so net dividends to shareholders are zero. This is a very peculiar way to run a republic.

Charlie Munger

#50. Back in the 1970s, Kodak tried to give $25m to a black civil rights organisation in Rochester, New York. The company's shareholders rose up in arms: making this politically charged offering wasn't the reason they had entrusted Kodak with their money. The donation was withdrawn.

Noreena Hertz

#51. In our search for more, we have blinded ourselves to our personal responsibility for challenging these absurdities. A resource-based society considers us all equal shareholders of Earth. We are responsible both for the planet and for our relationship with each other.

Jacque Fresco

#52. DaimlerChrysler made significant progress in the year 2005, but our earnings are still not where we want them to be. We intend to grow profitably and to create added value over the long term - for the benefit of our customers, employees and shareholders.

Dieter Zetsche

#53. We intend to conduct our business in a way that not only meets but exceeds the expectations of our customers, business partners, shareholders, and creditors, as well as the communities in which we operate and society at large.

Akira Mori

#54. In New York, we have laws against defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.

Eric Schneiderman

#55. A boycott would send a clear message to Yahoo shareholders and other companies which cheerfully sacrifice human rights in return for a cut of the Chinese market.

Simon Davies

#56. I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,

Alan Greenspan

#57. Scale can create value for shareholders; for consumers, who are beneficiaries of better products, delivered more quickly and at less cost; for the businesses that are our customers; and for the economy as a whole.

Jamie Dimon

#58. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served - as shareholders and in all other ways - by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

Larry Page

#59. Our goal is to make General Motors the most valuable automotive company. Clearly, that is having sustainable profitability and driving great returns for our shareholders.

Mary Barra

#60. I have a responsibility to banks, to shareholders.

Arnon Milchan

#61. The customer is number one, the employee is number two and the shareholder is number three. If the customer is happy, the business is happy, and the shareholders are happy.

Jack Ma

#62. A lot of people love Oreos. So their manufacturer is making money. That means more dividends for shareholders.

Maria Bartiromo

#63. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery.

Randall Robinson

#64. Customers first, employees second, and shareholders third,

Jack Ma

#65. I don't believe that someone who sets up an institution should be able to take out the money from the institution or pay dividends to shareholders. I am not saying that institutions should be set up for charity.

Pallam Raju

#66. In terms of companies, they must stand for something bigger. They must be dedicated to something larger than financial results. I reject the Milton Friedman belief that a company's sole responsibility is to the shareholders.

Srikumar Rao

#67. Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.

Steve Ballmer

#68. No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.

Lewis B. Smedes

#69. In a couple of years, the Chinese will be seen as regular participants in international industry. Their companies have to report to shareholders as well as to the Chinese authorities. They need to make money, they have to be efficient.

Daniel Yergin

#70. I really believe that all CEO pay should be voted on by shareholders ahead of time. Mine was.

Carly Fiorina

#71. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it - their shareholders would revolt at anything less.

Aaron Swartz

#72. Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal.

Joel Bakan

#73. A strong player, which has the sufficient critical mass, can withhold pressure better and create a more stable environment that benefits shareholders as well as employees.

Lakshmi Mittal

#74. I am convinced that companies should put staff first, customers second and shareholders third - ultimately that's in the best interest of customers and shareholders.

Richard Branson

#75. Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

Alex Berenson

#76. With less competition to fear, companies are emboldened to raise their mark-ups and profits. That lifts share prices and thus the wealth of already wealthy shareholders.

Edmund Phelps

#77. Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws.

Barton Gellman

#78. People need to understand: Businesses are going to make mistakes. They shouldn't be shot and hung every time. We should apologize for it. We should make up for it. My shareholders paid for it. No customer was hurt, which is critical to me. But I hurt my shareholders, and I wish I hadn't.

Jamie Dimon

#79. It's hard to tell which assets will be toxic. The best way to ensure that only shareholders and banks feel it is have adequate capital.

Alan Greenspan

#80. Shareholders have the right and obligation to set the parameters of corporate behavior within which management pursues profit.

Eliot Spitzer

#81. Patagonia, a large apparel manufacturer based in Ventura, California, has organized itself as a 'B-corporation.' That's a for-profit company whose articles of incorporation require it to take into account the interests of workers, the community, and the environment, as well as shareholders.

Robert Reich

#82. My job is to listen to ideas, maybe cook up a few of my own, and make decisions based on what's good for the shareholders and for the company.

Phil Knight

#83. We generated $13.5 billion in cash flow from operations and returned almost $21 billion in cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases during the March quarter. That brings cumulative payments under our capital return program to $66 billion.

Peter Oppenheimer

#84. I don't think of myself as a hard man, but other people may think otherwise. You know you have obligations to do the best you can for people, for your job, for your shareholders ... it all has to be balanced between the hardness and the softness.

Frank Lowy

#85. Some companies use off-balance-sheet partnerships to raise money or to buy assets without ever telling their shareholders in their financial statements.

Alex Berenson

#86. I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I'm not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.

Jack Ma

#87. Ultimately, each transnational firm strives for its own advantage, and is supported in that effort by the state power wherein it resides, or at least where its main shareholders are domiciled.

Herbert Schiller

#88. We have new rules that give shareholders the ability to vote on executive compensation. We have new rules for asset-backed securities. We have new rules around credit rating agencies.

Mary Schapiro

#89. CEOs should be measured by the value they create into the community, the shareholders and the members of the company.

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

#90. If you run a business, put on top your employees, then your consumers, and then your shareholders.

Richard Branson

#91. What if lawmakers never spoke to their constituents? Oddly enough, that's exactly how corporate America operates. Shareholders vote for directors, but the directors rarely, if ever, communicate with them.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#92. What the American people don't understand is how Merrill Lynch or AIG or Lehman Brothers can reward people, and the entity fails. Not only do the shareholders lose, but the entities lose.

Richard Grasso

#93. At a lot of companies founded on principles, the notion of making money is almost antithetical to the ethos of the place. From the very beginning, our business has existed to meet the needs and desires of multiple constituencies: customers, team members, vendors, shareholders, the community.

John Mackey

#94. Shareholders need to have a real interest in the companies they own. Too many are simply too busy - they are asleep at the wheel.

Nathan Kirsh

#95. The typical entrepreneur is no longer the bold and tireless man of Marshall, or the sly and rapacious Moneybags of Marx, but a mass of inert shareholders, indistinguishable from rentiers, who employ salaried managers to run their concerns.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

#96. I'm going to continue doing my thing and work my butt off to add value for shareholders and as long as they and the board see fit to keep me in this role, I feel enormously privileged to serve.

Andrew Mason

#97. Why would you as a consumer continue to support a product that exists to build someone's empire or satisfy shareholders, when you could buy a product that exists 100 per cent to help someone else? (pg 168)

Daniel Flynn

#98. I can make it very clear: I get paid if we make good investments. And if we don't, I don't get paid. I have no incentive to sell our companies to Google; the entrepreneurs get to decide that. We are minority shareholders.

Bill Maris

#99. I mean the good thing about Marvel is that they're really good about reading what they call the shareholders - the fans. Because they really are the keepers of what keeps these movies going, you know?

Justin Theroux

#100. What we're trying to do is determine if our shareholders and customers have been misled. We can't think of a single shareholder who would believe that the PSC order isn't in their best interest.

Chad Jones