Carly Fiorina Quotes

CEO compensation seems at time excessive but it should be up to the shareholders and boards of directors.

The days of CEOs getting rich while shareholders lose has got to end. Management must be accountable.

We invited HP executives to participate in the management and in the board. HCL had this concept of corporate officers since inception in 1999. We had a remuneration committee. Now everyone is talking about nomination and remuneration committee. We had this from 1999.

One way to promote shareholder engagement and activism is through greater accountability and transparency.

My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand.

Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.

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

The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

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

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

Well-managed companies with independent boards have nothing to fear from activist shareholders.

When Facebook went public, they didn't have a particularly strong model of governance.

I have always felt that public, commercial and community organisations should be as open as possible about their affairs. They need to be accountable to their owners, their customers, their members and communities and other interest groups.

Corporate governance should be done more through principles than rules.

I'm a cynic about corporate democracy and boards.

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.

For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored.

Only the corporation that shirks from the light would have anything to fear from government. About the welfare of such corporations we need not be over-sensitive.

Directors should be paid for promising impossible things.

When I took over the family business, it had already been a publicly traded company for 20 years. During one of the first annual meetings I attended, one shareholder stood up and advised me and everyone in attendance that I should resign.

We capitalists? We want transparency.

Requiring fund managers to disclose how they vote would increase accountability and mean that pensioners and ordinary investors would more easily be able to see how those acting on their behalf vote on all issues, including remuneration.

If the government is injecting public money, it should also take the right to oversee board appointments, executive pay, and future business operations.

Ownership has been separated from control; and this separation has removed many of the checks which formerly operated to curb the misuse of wealth and power.

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.