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Good decisions can have bad short-term outcomes but be great for the business long-term.

If a decision-making process is flawed and dysfunctional, decisions will go awry.

One has to live with the fact that some corporate decisions are going to be wrong. As long as most of the decisions are right.

A spine to my films that's become more evident to me is that many are about the choices people make, and the reverberations of those choices. You go this way, or that way, and either way, there's going to be consequences.

Everyone has an idea over time of what the business should be, and during the formative period, too many opinions could be disruptive.

In the auto industry, there's one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster.

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

I think you can say a lot of evil behavior by companies is short-term optimization.

If we are going to be able to create a new economic vision, companies will need to rethink every aspect of their operations; their bottom lines, ownership structures, demands on financial returns, how they raise capital. For example, an ethical company would say it should only take a fair share of the planet's resources and campaign on this.