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	REMARKS FOR THE USA CORPORATE 1000 PRESS CONFERENCE WASHINGTON DC MARCH 28, 1989

Good morning... thank you for coming.

Today, the United Shareholders Association is proud to unveil its Corporate 1000 ratings.

Its purpose: To fill a void of [Text stricken: important] shareholder information.

The FORTUNE 500 and Business Week 1000 ratings will be released in the next few weeks.

These traditional corporate rankings base their lists solely on a company’s size... factors such as gross revenues or market share.

But for shareholders, size is meaningless, and results are everything.

Before today, none of the corporate rankings said anything about how well the companies perform their primary mission, which is to create value for shareholders, the owners of America’s public corporations.

For example, USX is near the top of FORTUNE’s list, ranked number 23 out of 500.

But USX[Handwritten addition: ’s] [Text stricken: management’s] record is one of the worst in terms of performance for shareholders.

The traditional focus and preoccupation with size has lead to inefficient empirebuilding and corporate waste.

If Corporate America is to regain its competitivness, we must stop the focus on size and concentrate instead on results.

USA’s Corporate 1000 ratings measure a company’s performance in three critical areas:
— Stock Price and Dividend Performance
— Shareholder Rights
— and Management Ownership

Those are the areas USA members told us they care about most (USA membership survey in 1988).

To measure each company’s performance, we recorded the stock price appreciation, its post-crash recovery, and the [Text stricken: level of] dividends [Handwritten addition: payed] [Text stricken: returned] to the shareholders.

Then we studied the company’s by-laws and management policies toward shareholders.

And finally, we rated the level of management’s ownership [Text stricken: stake in the companies they run]... An abundance of empirical evidence points to a dramatic correlation between the manager’s personal financial risk and the company’s performance.

By scoring the companies in these areas, we were able to rank them from 1 to 1000, with the company receiving the most points being #1.

These rankings will tell America’s 50 million shareholders which companies are most responsive to the owners.

The USA ratings underscore the basic idea behind public corporations... Shareholders are owners, managers are employees who are hired to work for the shareholders.

Ultimately, the companies that adhere to the basic tenants of America’s free enterprise system are the ones that score highest on performance for shareholders.

The goal of every business must be to perform for its owners... Managers may have other responsibilities and constituencies, but their primary mission is to serve the shareholders:
Somehow, that idea has been lost by some managements

USA’s [Text stricken: Corporate 1000] ratings point out which managements are attuned to shareholder interests... Sort of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Corporate America.

Our goal is to be constructive... [Text stricken: For the first time,] we are focusing national attention on how well corporate management is responding to the owners of America’s public companies.

I must make it clear, however, that USA’s Corporate 1000 is not a list of “Stock tips”... Our ratings simply give shareholders a basis for determining which managers are doing the best job for shareholders.

USA’s Corporate 1000 is an owners manual for Corporate America.

It is a consumer guide, focusing on management accountability and corporate competitiveness... And that’s what USA is all about.

These ratings give us a means to illustrate our philosophy in [Handwritten addition: tangible] [Text stricken: concrete] terms.

We plan to release the USA Corporate 1000 ratings annually.

And I hope that next year all of these companies will at least earn a score above zero.

Thank you... Now I’ll take any of your questions.

Q & A

[Handwritten addition: Ralph Whitworth, Dir. USA and supervised the project.]