Success Quote by Lee R. Raymond

The line reads like a mission statement, but it’s also a tell: a corporate leader trying to reconcile two audiences that rarely stay reconciled for long. Lee R. Raymond, best known for steering Exxon through the era when climate politics became unavoidable, frames success as a moral project while keeping the scoreboard firmly in dollars. “Successful in economic terms” comes first, as the baseline competence test; ethics is positioned as the guardrail, not the destination.

The subtext lives in “constituency.” It borrows the language of democracy to describe markets, implying that corporations have voters (shareholders) and public servants (executives). That’s a soothing metaphor because it makes profit-seeking sound like representation. Yet it also narrows the moral circle. The “first responsibility” is explicitly inward: to shareholders or customers. Missing are employees, communities, regulators, and the unpriced externalities that modern capitalism often treats as someone else’s problem. By defining who counts as the constituency, the quote pre-decides whose claims are legitimate.

Context matters: late-20th-century corporate America was busy laundering shareholder primacy through the vocabulary of stewardship. Raymond’s formulation aims to inoculate business against accusations of greed: yes, we’re profit-driven, but ethically. The rhetorical move is elegant because it concedes the critique just enough to defang it. Ethics becomes compliance-plus, a style of winning rather than a check on whether winning should be the goal.