Success Quote by Lee R. Raymond

Raymond’s line reads like a shrug dressed up as principle: the only duty of a businessperson is “business.” It’s a neatly sealed tautology, and that’s the point. By defining the job in circular terms, he sidesteps every competing claim on corporate power - community obligations, environmental stewardship, political influence - and recasts them as optional extras, maybe even distractions. The sentence is engineered to sound tough-minded and apolitical while quietly advancing a very political idea: keep the moral ledger narrow, keep accountability narrower.

Coming from Lee R. Raymond, the longtime Exxon chief and one of the most forceful avatars of late-20th-century corporate confidence, the context matters. This isn’t an abstract meditation from a small-shop owner. It’s a worldview forged in an era when shareholder primacy hardened into common sense and “social responsibility” was often treated as a PR garnish or a Trojan horse for regulation. In that climate, “business is business” works as both permission slip and protective armor.

The subtext is also strategic defensiveness. If the professional responsibility is simply “business,” then harms that fall outside the balance sheet become someone else’s problem: regulators, consumers, voters, future generations. The brilliance - and the danger - is how the phrase pretends to be modest. It doesn’t claim corporations should run society; it claims they shouldn’t have to answer to it. That posture helped define the cultural mood of corporate America: efficient, unsentimental, and profoundly comfortable with externalizing costs.