Louis D. Brandeis Quotes

Most shareholders have little if any control over the companies in which they own stock, even if they own a million shares.

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

I really believe that all CEO pay should be voted on by shareholders ahead of time. Mine was.

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

Banks need to have large shareholders on the board that have a direct interest in their performance.

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.

I want to control the company, but I don't know how life goes. We are already a big company, and the larger our capitalization is, the lower goes the threshold for control.

You can look at what I did in the Senate. I did introduce legislation to rein in compensation. I looked at ways that the shareholders would have more control over what was going on in that arena. And specifically said to Wall Street, that what they were doing in the mortgage market was bringing our country down.

We had the controlling shares but we weren’t in control.

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

Left-wing shareholder activists seek to leverage the mass economic power of institutional investors such as pension funds, whose managers are supposed to focus strictly on their fiduciary responsibilities to retirees.

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

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.

If there is one thing worse for a manager than having an interfering owner it is uncertainty over the ownership.

Shareholders are sort of like cats; they get herded around, and they follow the leader. With the exception of a few activist shareholders, there are a very rare number of big, important, influential shareholders that like to step up and say there's a problem here, especially when they're making money.

I believe Washington should be a more active participant focusing on the issue of why corporate shareholders and mutual fund shareholders are not given fair treatment by corporate management and mutual fund management. We need to develop a national standard of fiduciary duty to ensure that these agents, if you will, are adequately representing the principles - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund shareholders - whom they are duty bound to serve.

Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots.

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

In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.

This great oracle of the East India Company himself admits that, if there is no power vested in the Court of Directors but that of the patronage, there is really no government vested in them at all.

My objection to interlocking directorates is not on the assumption that men mean to do wrong. It is because it is humanly impossible for a man representing conflicting interests on two boards and do right by both, no matter how pure his purpose is.

Governments are elected by people; corporations are not. Governments that must answer to the people; corporations must answer only to their boards.

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

Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief