Yes, I take your point, which is more precise and better argued than the author's. That is, I think your distillation of his argument misrepresents it by stripp

Yes, I take your point, which is more precise and better argued than the author's. That is, I think your distillation of his argument misrepresents it by stripping out the logical inconsistencies (and the irony). Montier's letter is rather more muddled than your comment. He suggests not only that optimizing returns in the short run is a poor strategy for creating long-term value for shareholders, but that the benchmark of share value (even over the long run) is a deficient measure of corporate performance. Everything Montier writes suggests that he believes companies did better (in some sense that he never quite articulates) in the era when managers ran their firms as they saw fit, before the idea took hold that they should try to maximize share value. So the irony of his argument is the incongruity of demeaning the very benchmark he uses to suggest that J&J has somehow been a better managed company than IBM; the major arc of his argument vitiates the evidence he uses to support it. It is ironic, in the comedic sense, that Montier seems to be so imbedded in the culture of maximizing shareholder value that he invokes that criterion, seemingly reflexively, in the course of his argument against it. But it's a logical and rhetorical mess, too. Montier's argument is analogous in your maze-solving formulation to claiming that the final distance from the exit is a poor measure of the performance of a maze-solving algorithm while at the same time maintaining that greedy algorithms are worse than random algorithms because it turns out that the greedy ones end up farther from the exit. If you accept the first claim, then the second is a non-sequitur, and advancing the second argument undermines the first.