A Quote by J. Irwin Miller

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.
Being captive to quarterly earnings isn't consistent with long-term value creation. This pressure and the short term focus of equity markets make it difficult for a public company to invest for long-term success, and tend to force company leaders to sacrifice long-term results to protect current earnings.
I have almost no interest in quarterly reports. Running a business or investing in a business based on quarterly earnings doesn't make any sense at all to me.
Trust-me companies are companies whose financial results gallop ahead of their businesses, companies with seemingly perfect control over their quarterly sales and profits. Companies whose financial statements are loaded with footnotes: companies that short-sellers often attack but rarely dent.
Immigrants aren't the reason wages haven't gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.
After careful consideration, we have decided that for our next fiscal year, we'll issue guidance on comparable store used unit sales and on earnings per share only for the full fiscal year. We will no longer issue quarterly guidance. This decision reflects our continuing focus on longer-term store, sales, and earnings growth and on return on invested capital, and our recognition that the performance in shorter-term periods can be more volatile than over the longer term. As we report our quarterly results, we plan to comment on how our performance is tracking against our annual guidance.
Show me a chief executive who’s on five boards and who lends his or her name, prestige and time to 15 community activities — and I’ll show you a company that’s underperforming. A chief executive is paid to run the company. That’s the CEO’s job.
Employers should overcome a myopic quarterly earnings posture and focus on long-term strategies for growth that include investing in their own skills-training efforts to enable a broader pool of applicants.
The insurance companies do not refer to the key policy rate when they send their statements. We can only control that rate. Long-term interest rates are determined largely by global financial markets.
As the founder and former chief executive of two publicly traded companies, I have had a great deal of exposure to how debt markets work.
A tremendous chief executive in a small market will never be great. All great companies start with great markets.
A young financial writer once brought ridicule upon himself by stating that a certain company had nothing to commend it except excellent earnings. Well, there are companies whose earnings are excellent but whose stocks I would never recommend. In selecting investments, I attach prime importance to the men behind them. I'd rather buy brains and character than earnings. Earnings can be good one year and poor the next. But if you put your money into securities run by men combining conspicuous brains and unimpeachable character, the likelihood is that the financial results will prove satisfactory.
I have to say that every white-collar criminal defense lawyer knows when the chief financial officer turns state's evidence, everyone in the executive suite is in a lot of trouble because the chief financial officer knows exactly where the money is coming and going.
Companies need connections to their markets to create long-term loyalty.
In business, every phase of things counts. Companies that just yell out a low price today to win business aren't going to make money in the long term.
If you truly want to innovate, there will be some failures, and this can be difficult for some organizations - especially public companies managing quarterly earnings.
The big picture is: the main thing you should be concerned about in the future are incremental returns on capital going forward. As it turns out, past history of a good return on capital is a good proxy for this but obviously not foolproof. I think this is an area where thoughtful analysis can add value to any simple ranking/screening strategy such as the magic formula. When doing in depth analysis of companies, I care very much about long term earnings power, not necessarily so much about the volatility of that earnings power but about my certainty of "normal" earnings power over time.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!