The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain - stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment - over the long term.
To have a healthy and thriving business, there must be healthy relationships with the C.E.O.S. in the organization and I'm not referring to the Chief Executive Offficers. I am talking about the Customers, the Employees, the Owner (or stockholders), and the Suppliers.
To generate any appreciable degree of long-term affluence requires scrupulous honesty and the willingness to honor long-term agreements with employers, suppliers, partners, and especially customers. The flimflam artist may generate a few quick bucks through fraud or misrepresentation, but no successful and lasting business enterprise was ever founded on such principles.
We believe that a company's obligations extend far beyond its bottom line and its shareholders - to a wider constituency that includes employees, customers, suppliers, and the community.
Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.
We believe that there is no greater power in the world than the force of a great idea. We believe that people are the lifeblood of every organization. We believe that the best companies are true meritocracies, where people rise and fall through their own contributions, not through game playing or politics. We believe that work isn't simply a paycheck; it is the ultimate expression of a fully realized self. We believe that a company's obligations extend far beyond its bottom line and its shareholders - to a wider constituency that includes employees, customers, suppliers, and the community.
The trust institutions have in the marketplace, the confidence customers and suppliers and workers and employees have, are very important to a business's effectiveness.
DaimlerChrysler made significant progress in the year 2005, but our earnings are still not where we want them to be. We intend to grow profitably and to create added value over the long term - for the benefit of our customers, employees and shareholders.
Who are businesses really responsible to? Their customers? Shareholders? Employees? We would argue that it’s none of the above. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.
Many companies operate from more of a command-and-control environment - they decide what's going to happen at headquarters and have the organization execute. That doesn't work here because it's the community of users who really have control.
So we enable, not direct. We think of our customers as people, not wallets. And that has implications for how we run the company. We partner with our customers and let them take the company where they think it's best utilized.
The company has been clear from the start that we try to serve customers long-term, and long-term investors are going to be more excited about Amazon than short-term investors.
Vladimir Putin doesn't really gain anything economically from annexation of Crimea. It's more a gain of power. It's a gain of what he can say to his home population about what he's accomplished as president. And so it's really much more an individual gain for Putin politically than for Russia as a state, because over the long term, Russia is not going to particularly benefit from this.
Without concentration, a business will be ordinary in every respect, because it will have no presence, no inner force, no way to attract the people upon whom it depends for its very existence - employees, customers, suppliers, and lenders.
We don't see that the Taliban ultimately can succeed, and it's a combination both of what the international community can do to support Afghanistan, not just in the short term, but over the long term.
I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments-genuine savings-in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.
Henry Ford has several times sneered at unproductive stockholders.... Well, now. Let's see. Who made Henry Ford's own automobile company possible? The stockholders who originally advanced money to him. Who makes it possible for you and me to be carried to and from business by train or street car? Stockholders.... Who made our vast telephone and telegraph service possible? Stockholders.... Were stockholders all over the country to withdraw their capital from the enterprises in which they are invested, there would be a panic ... on a scale never before known.
We dont see that the Taliban ultimately can succeed, and its a combination both of what the international community can do to support Afghanistan, not just in the short term, but over the long term.