Hoo boy. Thanks for mentioning the earlier blog discussion, Savio. It's at http://blogs.stage.cfainstitute.org/investor/2014/09/24/maximization-of….
Usman, I think the best part of your discussion (here and at the 2014 European Investment Conference post) is the survey results you report. It's hard to argue that corporate executives make mistakes--some of them serious--in their attempts to maximize shareholder value; in fact, much of the economic research that you so denigrate (including the research from behavioral finance) is directed toward documenting ways in which corporate leaders hurt shareholder value, and understanding why they do it, with the implicit goal of avoiding the mistakes that allowed it to happen.
But it's equally hard to argue that the goal of shareholder value maximization itself is flawed. Maximizing shareholder value does NOT mean sacrificing the long-term health of the corporation to meet quarterly earnings targets: it means maximizing the long-term health of the corporation.
Usman, comparing the returns of IBM and Johnson & Johnson over a 42-year period--and suggesting that the only difference between them is that one explicitly and publicly sought to maximize shareholder value and the other did not--is silly. You should be as embarrassed to report the comparison as Montier should have been in making it. His "wider" analysis sounds much more interesting, but I have no idea what he means by "adjusting for changes in valuation independent of shareholder value maximization."
Again, the goal of shareholder value maximization is not the problem: apart from manipulation, the stock price is the best measure of the long-term health of the corporation, so maximizing it MEANS taking a long-term view and optimizing all aspects of what the corporation does. If executives are failing to optimize all aspects from a long-term perspective, then they are failing to maximize shareholder value; and if they're doing so persistently, then they should be replaced.