While one should never underestimate the ability of risk-besotted financiers to wreak havoc, the real threat to capitalism isn't unfettered financial cunning. It is, instead, the unwillingness of executives to confront the changing expectations of their stakeholders.
Executives will talk about the importance of passion, but what they really mean is finding somebody who will work nights and weekends on their assigned task but predictably and reliably follow orders and just work harder.
All businesses require capital, management and labor, and business executives, wanting to grow and maintain profitable enterprises, have a strong incentive to keep costs, including labor, as low as possible.
The dirty little secret on Wall Street: Eighty percent of the Wall Street executives' and their spouses' donations go to Democrats. It's like they've got some kind of little sweet deal, where we'll call you fat cats and demean you and stuff, but you will get richer than your wildest dreams.
I attended first a military academy, then a public school in Beverly Hills, where we lived, and many of my classmates were the children of movie stars and studio executives.
The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.
There are networks and executives who are willing to take risks on vastly different material, and as an actor, there are some really juicy roles to sink your teeth into.
Businessmen... were not born chief executives. They were often people first.
One of the great things about Silicon Valley is, irrespective of how competitive you might be with another company or how closely you might be working with that company, there's a great sort of give and take, and camaraderie from - between - some of the executives in the valley and some of the other investors in the valley.
There's so many gatekeepers to getting in front of showrunners or executives. If we pull those middlemen out, and we get women in rooms with the executives, the people hiring, it seems to break down barriers. Because they can no longer say, 'There just aren't any women to hire,' when you're surrounded by fifty of them.
If Madison Avenue advertising executives were to pick a song that would best represent America, the last one they would choose is 'The Star Spangled Banner.'
On the Web you have to sum up what your piece of content is in one link or nobody is going to watch it. That's the same thing I've been hearing from TV executives - is we need a program that you can have on the side of a bus and someone can watch it go by and get what the show is and want to watch it.
And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.
Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.
On two occasions, utility executives I'd never met had looked at me and said, 'I thought you'd be bigger!' In a way, I took that as a compliment!
During my whole year as Miss America and afterward, I was calling agents, looking for advice and opportunities. When I was in New York or in Los Angeles doing different appearances, if I had time on my schedule, I tried to meet with executives.
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.
All the old great companies were run by guys who knew what an animator meant, and guys who knew how to draw. All the companies today are run by executives.
Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa.
Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.
I think the executives have matured enough so that they recognize that we have a two-party system. In California, we have more than a two-party system.
I have spoken to a whole group of millionaires, head executives at Microsoft. Boy did I chew those guys out.
Well, for one thing, the executives in charge at Cartoon Network are cartoon fans. I mean, these are people who grew up loving animation and loving cartoons, and the only difference between them and me is they don't know how to draw.
The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.
Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.
I find it quite difficult on studio films because there are so many different executives and things like that that you have to go through, so very often getting that definitive opinion is actually quite difficult.
I didn't listen to executives.
Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else.
I have a big mouth, and I have a temper, so that's not good for people. That's not good for executives.
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.
I've got corporate executives, my bosses... this is true... who will text message me... and say, 'Hey a, heard you had chemotherapy today, want me to stop by and pick you up something to eat and bring it to you?' Whose boss does that? My bosses do that.
I doubt very much that the chief executives of any of the Fortune 500 corporations can name five edible plants, five native grasses, or five migratory birds within walking distance of their homes, or name the soil series upon which their house sits. And I would contend that if you don't know where you are, you are in fact nowhere at all.
Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.
As I've seen over and over again during my career, the best way to deter individual conduct is the threat of going to jail. That's what truly changes behavior. That's what changes the calculus as employees and executives decide whether to participate in an illegal scheme.
We can no more condone the wastefulness of self-serving company executives than we can the sacrifice of the lives of our citizens in a senseless war.
Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics, and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies.