Quotes from Charles G. Koch

The role of business in society is to help people improve their lives by providing products and services they value more highly than their alternatives, and to do so while consuming fewer resources.

She personified a principled regard for the community, which to me reflects Adam Smith's vision: And hence it is, that to feel much for others, and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety.3

Companies are always lobbying for special treatment, but during that recession a large number of them stepped up their pressure on the government for favors. They did so quite effectively—but at the expense of taxpayers and consumers, and to the rigged disadvantage of their competitors.

that this was a lesson my father impressed on me at an early age: "Often adversity is a blessing in disguise and is certainly the greatest character builder." Fred Koch's

The bottom line of my business philosophy can best be summed up as follows: Good profit can only result from creating value for the customer. It is the manifestation of the entrepreneur's respect for what the customer values.

Thomas Sowell eloquently counters this assumption when he writes, "To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more…without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits."3

4. Principled Entrepreneurship: This principle—so central to our culture that we had it trademarked—is defined as "maximizing the long-term profitability of the business by creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity." Creating value for society requires Principled Entrepreneurship—not political or other forms of entrepreneurship, such as corporate welfare or fraud.

This was Good Profit 101: providing the best hassle-free service to our clients at the lowest cost to them and attracting the best employees based on the opportunities we offered. Our goal was—and still is—to be the counterparty of choice to our customers, vendors, communities, and employees.

But be careful: Measures are only beneficial if they lead to profitable action. It is tempting to measure things simply because they are easy to measure; instead, we need to measure things that matter, even when it is difficult to do so. "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts,"4 Einstein observed.