[acdha]

> And companies/management have a fiduciary duty to give them as little as possible.

This is a popular myth but if you do any research you’ll learn it’s not true. There’s no such requirement because there’s no way to reliably predict the future impact of decisions: for example, does paying “too much” for employees lower turnover and avoid them starting competitors? Skimping on maintenance, outsourcing jobs, or taking on debt will definitely “maximize” shareholder value for a little while, until the bill comes due.

Think for a minute about how you’d argue any of those points in court and you’ll understand why the real laws have significant deference to executives’ judgement. Neither side would have any trouble finding people to say their decision was best, and even after the fact there are inevitably many factors which people can point to when explaining whatever happened.

[matz1]

I think more accurate to say the fiduciary duty is to make money as much as possible. At least that I would want the my company to do.

[acdha]

Try to find a legal statement to that effect. You’ll find a lot of people claiming that but there’s nothing binding for the reasons I gave: nothing is certain in business and people will reasonably differ about the best ways to produce growth over any non-trivial time scale. Remember all of the people who very confidently said that Apple was wasting its time with phones and would never overtake Nokia?