Alcoa Quotes & Sayings

Business cycles naturally entail peaks and troughs in employment, and socially responsible businesses should follow successful examples like Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Saudi Aramco, Africa Rainbow Minerals, and Google in working toward mitigating joblessness and enhancing people's abilities to earn a livelihood. — Klaus Schwab

The [Dow-Alcoa and Alcoa-IG] negotiations [of 1929] reveal strikingly the technique of cartel diplomacy - the steady application of "pressure" and the resort alternatively to challenges and blandishments. The similarity to power politics in which trial by battle is a last resort is marked. The procedure discloses the vast gulf between big business in practice and the patterns of behavior assumed in a regime of free competition. It shows how the conference table superseded the market as the arena for decision making. — George W. Stocking

tenure at Treasury was not as successful as his career at Alcoa. Almost immediately after taking office he began focusing on a couple of key issues, including worker safety, job creation, executive accountability, and fighting African poverty, among other initiatives. However, O'Neill's politics did not line up with those of President Bush, and he launched an internal fight opposing Bush's proposed tax cuts. He was asked to resign at the end of 2002. "What I thought was the right thing for economic policy was the opposite of what the White House wanted," O'Neill told me. "That's not good for a treasury secretary, so I got fired. — Charles Duhigg

What's more, all that growth occurred while Alcoa became one of the safest companies in the world. — Charles Duhigg

Within a year of O'Neilrs speech, Alcoa's profits would hit a rec- ord high. — Charles Duhigg

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people - or, to put it more plainly, elves - in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free, but, as he put it, we couldn't as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people. — Michael Lewis