Paul Craig Roberts Quotes

A lot of deals are done or not done because chief executives are not fully aligned to shareholders.

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.

I had no idea until I joined the games industry and met some of the power players, particularly those running large public companies, that much of this world is run by complete clowns.

The average member of the public thinks of 'business' as an impersonal corporate entity, owned by the very rich and managed by over-paid executives.

Excessive pay and rewards for failure are bad for shareholders, the economy and society.

We've got some well-run corporations by some well-intended people who do it right.

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

I happen to represent Enron here in Houston. We have many good corporate citizens here in Houston. Enron happened to have been one.

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

The future of any corporation is as good as the value system of the leaders and followers in the organization.

There are many highly successful businesses in the United States. There are also many highly paid executives. The policy is not to intermingle the two.

Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

Millennials are more aware of society's many challenges than previous generations and less willing to accept maximizing shareholder value as a sufficient goal for their work. They are looking for a broader social purpose and want to work somewhere that has such a purpose.

And also, more and more businesses really want to do the right thing. They feel better about themselves, their workers feel better, and so do their customers. I think this is equally true in the transnational corporations, but it is harder to express in those situations.

Companies should not have a singular view of profitability. There needs to be a balance between commerce and social responsibility... The companies that are authentic about it will wind up as the companies that make more money.

By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

The good parts about being a public company are increased discipline, increased execution and increased transparency to make sure that you are really building a company for a hundred years.

I think one purpose is very clear among corporations and business leaders: make profits, deliver high return for stockholders, conquer markets, service consumers and create jobs. But in today's world, demands from corporations and leaders are much more than that. We need to understand what people really want at the very end.

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.

Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.

There's been a sea change in our focus on corporate ethics. We've made more progress in the last three years than the previous 30.

People should be encouraged by things like awards given for corporate governance practices.

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

I have never seen Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, or Reed Hastings complain about being public. Nor have they ever argued that being public prevented them from doing things with a long-term focus.