# Director (business)

Director is a rank in management, usually a person who leads or supervises a certain area of a company, program, or project.

## Quotes

* Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal.
** Joel Bakan (2004) The Corporation Chapter 2, Business As Usual, p. 36
* The director is really a watch-dog, and the watch-dog has no right without the knowledge of his master to take a sop from a possible wolf.
** Charles Bowen, Baron Bowen, In re North Australian Territory Co. (1891), L. J. Rep. 61 C. D. 135; reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904)
* We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.
** Paul Goodman (1956) Growing Up Absurd p. 94
* I believe that science is best left to scientists, that you cannot have managers or directors of science, it's got to be carried out and done by people with ideas, people with concepts, people who feel in their bones that they want to go ahead and develop this, that, or the other concept which occurs to them.
** Mark Oliphant (1994) Portraits in Science interviews
* The office of director … a man ought not to fill without qualification.
** Lord Selborne, Brown's Case (1873), L. R. 9 C. App. 102, 106; Reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904)
* Organizations and institutions provide the general stimuli and attention - directors that channelize the behaviors of the members of the group, and that provide those members with the intermediate objectives that stimulate action.
** Herbert A. Simon (1947). Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization. 4th ed. in 1997, The Free Press, p. 100
* The writer, who as an engineer has spent most of his life in factories, is inclined to look at the basis for investment from a technological point of view... Consider … the class of industrial investments only... The situation is one of entrepreneurs and boards of directors considering, from time to time, various ’possibilities of investment’, such as extra lathes or looms, an extension to a factory, a venture in some completely new product, and so on. It is helpful to think of these ’opportunities for investment’ as existing, in a given situation, in great number and variety, whether they are at that moment under active consideration or not. When any such possibility is considered it is assessed in respect of ’expected profitability’. One may conveniently think of all possibilities of investment as ’quanta’ that can be placed in a schedule of small ranges of expected profitability according to these assessments. The placement of a given ’opportunity for investment’ on this schedule has some ’margin of uncertainty’ (a curious analogy with the case of the quanta of physics).
** Arnold Tustin (1953) The Mechanism of Economic Systems p. 103; As cited in: Prices Revalued as Information: Circuit Elements, online document 2013
* I do not wish in any way to depart from the principle that a wrongdoing director, whether he be morally or legally wrong, should be made liable for the highest amount which could have been obtained from the property wrongly taken by him while it was in his hands.
** Webster, M.R., Shaw v. Holland (1900), L. R. 2 C. D.; C A. [1900], p. 310; reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904).

## See also

* Film director
* Leadership
* Manager