Lee R. Raymond Quotes

A corporation that is publicly traded, it has one goal: to make money. It doesn't have a soul. If it does have a soul, it comes from the people who run it.

You have to decide who you are going to serve - stockholders or your customers.

The question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.

Companies that are publicly held have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to try to maximize their profits within ethical reasons.

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don't have much wiggle room here.

Doing good business - being ethical, being transparent, being caring, implementing values in your business - makes a difference, and you make money at the same time.

Companies and leaders are role models - not just with the business community - but in the broader world.

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

A business of high principle generates greater drive and effectiveness because people know that they can do the right thing decisively and with confidence.

So much business is based on the belief that we should do whatever we can within legal limits to make as much money as we can. Ben & Jerry's was based on values, and we try to operate a business that not just sells ice cream but partners with all our stakeholders - whether that's suppliers or customers - to bring about a more sustainable world.

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

Corporations are not capable of doing things out of the goodness of their hearts. They don’t have hearts.

The pendulum of capitalism has swung way too far to only trying to maximize the profit of shareholders rather than many of the traditional other virtues and accomplishments of a company.

As a pro-business Democrat, I understand the obligations of publicly traded companies to maximize returns to shareholders.

The obligation of every ethical management is to make sure we optimize the long-term value of the company.

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.'

Our core values and business ethics will always be paramount in all that we do, and we are always looking to do the right thing and settle claims fairly and accurately.

Our responsibility is to maximise shareholder value, and if that means we can make short-term investment where we can maximise short-term value, we can do that.

It's not just about checking the box on corporate social responsibility. It's about hitting our bottom line.

...it's always been difficult for us to lead an examined life as a corporation. I've always felt like a company has the responsibility to not wait for the government to tell it what to do, or to wait for the consumer to tell it what to do, but as soon as it finds out it's doing something wrong, stop doing it.

The part of capitalism that doesn't work for me is when capitalists make decisions in the way that Adam Smith suggested, which is that as long as you do everything in the interest of the investor, you're going to actually make the best decisions for all other stakeholders. I don't happen to agree with that.

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.

It makes no sense to talk of the social obligations of the corporation without reference to its economic obligations. The two are intertwined.

We need business to understand its social responsibility, that the main task and objective for a business is not to generate extra income and to become rich and transfer the money abroad, but to look and evaluate what a businessman has done for the country, for the people, on whose account he or she has become so rich.

We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.