In Search of Shareholder Value

Rarely has a phrase buzzed so persistently as shareholder value. And rarely have buzzwords been so fuzzy. As that well known CEO, Humpty Dumpty, said, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' In the interests of better informed IR, we checked dictionaries from the Oxford English to Barron's Guide to Financial Terms, and drew a complete blank. So we decided we'd better see if we could deduce its meaning from usage and origins. Trawling the databases,