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Investors should start with a view of skepticism. They should become intellectual investors rather than emotional investors. They should be careful, and they should be skeptical.

Hundreds of investors ask me questions each year about the dilemmas they confront. Their worst problem? Uncertainty. They are traumatized and become emotional or confused to the state of inaction. Even worse, they try to solve a short-term problem in a way that hurts them financially in the long run.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

But successful investors tend to be not too self-destructive. They tend to be patient, they tend not to follow the crowd, and they tend not to be too guilty about winning.

If you're constantly making business decisions on behalf of your investors first, ultimately you're going to wear down your other stakeholders. It's going to be potentially hurtful for your employees and your customers and the community you do business with.

Investors don't like uncertainty.

I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy.

I don't want to take a company public and not have it do extremely well and fail the public shareholder.

In the age of activism that is clearly not going away, it would seem that some form of engagement from directors with shareholders - rather than directors simply taking their cues from management - would go a long way toward helping boards work on behalf of all shareholders rather just the most vocal.

One should not treat investors or a person who has set up an industry and is a successful businessman as criminals in this country. I am fully aware that everybody has a right to succeed, and success should be with ethics.