>The shareholders should be the one with power to make decisions, as they own the company. They don't actually, see: Consider first Friedman’s erroneous belie

>The shareholders should be the one with power to make decisions, as they own the company. They don't actually, see: Consider first Friedman’s erroneous belief that shareholders “own” corporations. Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2311&context=facpub http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... [pdf] >The issue with abandoning the maximizing the shareholders profit mentality is that it has to be replaced with something else, and unless we change the way investment works, then it will still be serving the shareholders. But this is relatively easy! Instead of top level management being rewarded for stock price only, they should also be rewarded for other metrics, like customer satisfaction or how much they lowered the spread between median and mean wages. Hell, we could even allow it to be determined only by share price, but only the share price on a long time horizon, no sales within five years.