But Robbins, a prudent chief executive, isn't taking any risks.
That is financially prudent for executives, but deeply unpopular with Chinese authorities, which both loses corporate control and also loses the future growth that these stocks attain when they list on a foreign exchange.
"As we have shown here, you've just got to be smarter as a union and be more prudent," said John Knowles, chief executive of Manawatu.
The tone in the industry may no longer be set by people such as Mr Ellison, but by more prudent and cerebral chief executives such as SAP's Henning Kagermann.Incumbents will not find it easy to manage this transition: they will have to wean themselves from the heroin of growth.
"We had a contract but we decided it wouldn't be prudent to enforce it," the executive said.
"It's just fiscally prudent," Wallace Chappell, the company's executive director, said of the decision, which is to be formally announced today.
"Because there have been no settlements reached for the securities action with any of the less-involved banks, it is difficult to know what reserves are prudent," Ed Clark, president and chief executive of Toronto-Dominion, said in a statement.
"From Dr. Hampers's perspective this is a nonevent and as people look at the order they'll recognize that he took every prudent step that any reasonable executive of a subsidiary would take," Mr. Hampers's lawyer, Lloyd Macdonald, said.
"You have to separate out what is an economic development goal from a prudent approach to investing," said Randall W. Eberts, executive director of the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Peter J. Schmitt, the minority leader, said his caucus did not want to allow any larger tax increase, saying it was not "a wise and prudent thing to give the county executive any more money than he requested".
