George J. Mitchell Quotes

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.

There's a myth out there that you have to genuflect at the altar of quarterly earnings. But it's a false choice that you can either be a good fiduciary or promote values such as environmental sustainability.

I believe a board in a small startup company should never vote on anything.

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.

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.

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

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

I think, you know, a fellow CEO said to me that the interesting thing about being CEO that's really striking is that you have very few decisions that you need to make, and you need to make them absolutely perfectly.

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.

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.'

We continue to hope that a way can be found for Benchmark to move forward, having profited so handsomely from the work of Travis Kalanick and many others, and to do so without inflicting gratuitous harm on the company which we have all supported, and for which we continue to have the greatest expectations.

[Adviser is] the ones who do the job very well are the ones who lay out the range of options, filter down the range of options that are available to the president, lay them out in an honest, brokerage way and then let the president make the choice among those options.

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.

The timing of your decision is just as important as the decision you make.

I think we've got to look at corporate law. Back in the day when I studied it, there were different constituencies that were to be served, and I think there was a real wrong turn about 20 to 25 years ago when the theory began to be promoted that your highest duty - in fact, some would argue, your only duty - is to maximize shareholder return. I just don't buy it. And it wasn't the original underpinnings of the legal theory of corporate law.

Strategy is choice. Strategy means saying no to certain kinds of things.

If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.

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.

As a basic matter, the fiduciary duty that the CEO and board of a publicly traded corporation owe to shareholders is inconsistent with allowing the company to be turned into a partisan political fighting machine.

It's the choosing that's important, isn't it?

Making decisions was the painful part for me, the part I agonized over. But once the decision was made, I simply followed through—usually with relief that the choice was made. Sometimes the relief was tainted by despair, like my decision to come to Forks. But it was still better than wrestling with the alternatives.

When Wal-Mart brings water down to the Katrina victims, it's not doing that to be nice; it's doing it to make larger profits and to increase the value of its shares. If its actions are not accomplishing those objectives, the shareholders can sue the executives, and sue them successfully, because it is illegal for them to act on behalf of any other reason than increasing the value of their shares. There is nothing wrong with that. That is the way that they were created and the way we want them to function to increase prosperity in the market.

We all have many opportunities, but limited capacity to pursue them. Make choices, focus your time and energy, so that you can submit your share of masterpieces to the greater good.

If you have to choose between power and speed and it often turns out you have to make that choice, you've got to go for speed.