Shareholders In Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders - in that order.

Simon Sinek

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. In the 1980s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly takeovers of companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders - if they abandoned their other stakeholders.

Robert Reich

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Banks need to have large shareholders on the board that have a direct interest in their performance.

Mian Muhammad Mansha

#18. In our industry today only a strong company with a global reach can ensure long-term employment and provide acceptable returns for shareholders.

Lakshmi

#19. He or she must be successful in economic terms, but always within an ethical framework. Whether his or her constituency is a corporation and its shareholders or the customers in a small and privately held business, his or her first responsibility is to serve that constituency.

Lee R. Raymond

#20. I've heard people say South Africans are arrogant, that they act no differently from their colonial masters. That needs to change. It's in your business interest as an entrepreneur to form meaningful partnerships. That's how you do well for your shareholders.

Patrice Motsepe

#21. There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.

James Surowiecki

#22. Corporate executives need to re-frame their responsibilities to include the interests of all the stakeholders in society at large; not just shareholders, but also employees, the citizens of our communities, and those who care about the environment.

Simon Mainwaring

#23. My obligation is to the owners of Barclays, my shareholders. They hired me. People who criticise compensation for individuals in isolation at, say, BarCap, individuals who don't work in the U.K. and are competing with U.S., German or Asian banks, they should look at all these factors.

Bob Diamond

#24. Most shareholders have little if any control over the companies in which they own stock, even if they own a million shares.

Robert Kiyosaki

#25. Loyal employees in any company create loyal customers, who in turn create happy shareholders.

Richard Branson

#26. Compensation needs to be predominately performance-driven. 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.

Louis V. Gerstner Jr.

#27. The banks don't have anything - no rights whatsoever. The banks are shareholders of SLEC, and SLEC has no rights ... I am the CEO of Formula One Management and Formula One Administration, which runs the business in F1. From this point of view, I own F1.

Bernie Ecclestone

#28. Michael, don't you know by now that my grandmother and Uncle Alfred are the largest private shareholders of Singapore Press Holdings? We're not going to be in the papers. We're never going to be in the papers.

Kevin Kwan

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

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

John Gutfreund

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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.

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

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

Eric Schneiderman

#53. 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