19 Quotes by John Kay

No one will be buried with the epitaph ‘He maximised shareholder value.

We all chase the dream, but when taken to excess by individuals or in crowds, the chasing of dreams becomes madness. And chasing the dream with other people’s money is at best irresponsible and often fraudulent.

The disparities of income and wealth in the world today are an affront to any reflective person.

The Thatcherite emphasis on hard work and self-reliance sat alongside a belief that compassion should be a private virtue rather than a social practice. These are attitudes very different from the greedy individualism and sense of personal entitlement characteristic of much of the finance sector today.

Stock markets are not a way of putting money into companies, but a means of taking it out. The.

For all that has recently been said about ‘the wisdom of crowds’, the authors prefer to fly with airlines which rely on the services of skilled and experienced pilots, rather than those who entrust the controls to the average opinion of the passengers.

The great muckraker Upton Sinclair had expressed a deep insight into the relationship between the world of ideas and the world of practical men: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’34.

There is a role for carrots and sticks, but to rely on carrots and sticks alone is effective only when we employ donkeys and we are sure exactly what we want the donkeys to do.

The claim that the only constraints on our success are the limits of our imagination, although generally false, has lifted hearts for millennia. Grand visions take precedence over prosaic numbers.