Here's part of Wikipedia's description of the case you cited: > By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of

Here's part of Wikipedia's description of the case you cited: > By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the cost of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased. The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars. In public defense of this strategy, Ford declared: > “My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business. ” > While Ford may have believed that such a strategy might be in the long-term benefit of the company, he told his fellow shareholders that the value of this strategy to them was not a primary consideration in his plans. The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments. Two brothers, John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge, owned 10% of the company, among the largest shareholders next to Ford. I don't have time to read the actual court documents, so I'll assume this is reasonably accurate. It seems Ford was trying to say "screw shareholder value, we're doing the right thing because we want to support society." This was of course a losing argument. But it sounds like the whole problem was the argument. Couldn't the argument be "we did the right thing and took a short-term loss, but we believe this is in the company's, and by extension the shareholders', best interest because [it will create tons of goodwill | it creates tons of good PR for us | whatever]"?