John Maeda Quotes

The trouble, in my opinion, with corporate America today, is that everything is thought of in quarters.

Big companies are reliant on institutional investors on a punishing schedule which leads to ruthless behaviour. This form of capitalism with this structure and incentives will never deliver sustainability.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

Well, Hollywood isn't made up of individual studio heads anymore. It's made of corporations. And corporations are looking for the bottom line. They don't want to take chances. They want the money back for stockholders.

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

Once America's CEOs get back to the business of growing their companies rather than growing their share prices, shareholder value will take care of itself, and all Americans will share in the higher wages and other benefits of a renewed era of economic growth.

Corporations and Wall Street in pursuit of short-term profits have given the economy away.

There is still too much pressure on short-termism in terms of the drivers of success.

To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

The big companies are the private industry. But they're faced with a short-term need to show a profit in short-term.

Immigrants aren't the reason wages haven't gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.

Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.

I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it's time America was run like a business.

The corporate killer downsizing is directly responsive to what the mutual funds have wanted.

In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.

Can we please agree that in the real world, corporations exist for one purpose and one purpose only - to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?

Auto executives have shunned the limits-of-growth issues and concentrated nearly all their energies on the next quarter's sales and next year's models.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

You can demonize Goldman Sachs all you want, and I'm sure there are reasons to do it. But the real pressure is all of us pressuring the companies for stock returns, and that leads to all kinds of decisions.

Being a public company certainly doesn't stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon, but it does make it more difficult.

We need to be focused in corporate America on the long term.

My shareholders expect me to make the most profit. That's the ugly, dirty truth.

I liked being CEO of Blockbuster, but my job is to put it on the bottom line for shareholders.

I think the private sector for the most part, the vast majority of employers in America, they wake up in the morning, and they have a bottom line. This is how much they make, this is how much their expenses are; they certainly need to break even just to stay in business, and they need to make a profit in order to survive long-term.