That's an incredibly reductionist view, and I'm so tired of people parroting it over and over again as if it's insightful. I mean, maximize shareholder value ho

That's an incredibly reductionist view, and I'm so tired of people parroting it over and over again as if it's insightful. I mean, maximize shareholder value how? And how do they continue to maximize shareholder value? And over what period are they maximizing shareholder value? And how do they try find global maxima instead of local maxima? Is your answer to this simply going to be to parrot "maximize shareholder value" again? Not all companies are started with the goal being "to maximize shareholder value." Try pitching that to VCs. Try trying to get a small business loan, telling your bank "ahh yes, I noticed that there are too-few companies maximizing shareholder value, so I'm going to do that." "Maximize shareholder value" is not a company. A company needs vision, it needs to do something or build something. A company needs profit, and preferably lots of it, yes, but it also needs a guiding philosophy that informs the markets it enters and the ways it enters them. You can call it "marketing fluff", but it's what makes the company what it is. For the best companies, profit is part of the vision, but it does not subsume the vision. Google and Apple are both very successful companies, but they're both very different. You can deride the difference between them as marketing fluff, but I call it "successfully executing on vision."