Ceo Quotes by Bill Gates, Bill Moyers, Larry Ellison, Craig Ferguson, Gary Hamel, Jack Levin and many others.
The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.
Technology affects everyone, from agriculture to broadcasting to automotive to content to travel to leisure to everything, so we’re seeing an incredible array of CEOs from every different industry.
If Trump and his team are able to lower the corporate tax rate to 15%, you look out. The left have told people that corporations are gonna hide the money or shelter the money or keep it for the CEO. They’re not gonna give it away, they’re not gonna sharing it, it isn’t gonna trickle down. You watch.
Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn’t to say there aren’t entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there’d be no reason for the old. Our life span reflects our particular life strategy.
The networked world offers the promise that maybe the information technology industry will start to, for the first time in a decade or so, address CEO-level issues.
Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won’t change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO’s pay.
I don’t understand why people whose entire lives or their corporate success depends on communication, and yet they are led on occasion by CEOs who cannot talk their way out of a paper bag and don’t care to.
News flash, lady. There are no queens anymore,” Shane said. He loaded shells in a shotgun and snapped it shut, then searched for a place to strap it on that didn’t interfere with the flamethrower. “No queens, no kings, no emperors. Not in America. Only CEOs. Same thing, but not so many crowns.
I don’t hold myself out as a role model. I don’t believe that everyone should make the same choices; that everyone has to want to be a CEO, or everyone should want to be a work-at-home mother. I want everyone to be able to choose. But I want us to be able to choose unencumbered by gender choosing for us.
One of the things I’ve had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.
What if one out of every three multinational corporation CEO’s were raped every year? Don’t you think that would raise a kind of ruckus?
To build a great company, which is a CEO’s job, sometimes you have to stand up against conventional wisdom.
Every time I meet the CEO of a record label I tell them how they did it in the seventies because they want to know. I tell them, “Sign a hundred people! Throw it against the wall and see which ones stick!” And they frown and say, “Oh, we can’t do that!” and they start mumbling about demographics and this and that.
The leverage Wall Street has to change the world is greater than technology. At a very young age, you’re in the room with CEOs, making critical decisions. It should be exciting. It is exciting.
Too many people hold the idea that psychopaths are essentially killers or convicts. The general public hasn’t been educated to see beyond the social stereotypes to understand that psychopaths can be entrepreneurs, politicians, CEOs and other successful individuals who may never see the inside of a prison.
Most female CEOs have been more understanding than their male counterparts, of the stress that new mothers experience to ‘do it all,’ which often means, ‘all by themselves.’ Why? They’ve been there. They understand the policies needed to keep women in the workforce.
I am who I am, and I’m focused on that, and being a great CEO of Apple.
Being a CEO still means sitting across the table from big institutional investors and showing your leadership and having them believe in you.
People at my level [Unilever CEO] shouldn’t be motivated by salary. If you paid me double, I’m not going to work twice as much, because I’m already probably maximizing my time available. And would it change the way I do things? Not really. So, yes, I am fortunate, and I am ashamed about the amount of money I earn.
What the polls don’t tell you is, though other polls do, is that if you do a study of CEOs, top executives in corporations, they’re liberal.
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Your reaction is, ‘It’s not my fault.’ But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, laid off over 100,000 employees. His reward? When he retired from GE, he received a golden parachute of over $400 million dollars. This is the kind of corporate greed and irresponsibility that is destroying the middle class and must be ended.
You want a CEO that understands they need to build a team around them that’s sharper and smarter than they are.
The most important thing I’ve learned since becoming CEO is context. It’s how your company fits in with the world and how you respond to it.
As the CEO running my life, running Meghan Trainor, I have to say ‘no’ to things all the time, and it’s been very uncomfortable and very difficult. I’ve said ‘no’ and it’s actually worked – even when I never thought it would work.
Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn’t realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn’t understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.
CEOs hate variance. It’s the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.
Being a president is being a CEO, essentially.
I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.
CEOs need to produce continuous growth in sales and profits. Yet they must also invest in sustainability and social responsibility, which then leave them less money for financing their growth.
If you think you can’t, you’re right.
I’ve been wondering for a while now if the CEO role is one that I want – and the one that I’m best at.
[T]here‘s a difference between confident leadership and empty-headed delusion or cheerleading. And this is a difference that many CEOs miss.
It’s interesting that there’s so many different sides of this: Women get frustrated that we don’t get paid enough; and then the Republicans or the CEOs that are men say, “Well, it’s because women take off time for maternity leave.”
The Fed has got to become a more democratic institution that is responsive to the needs of the middle class, not just Wall Street CEOs.
Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.
Twenty years ago, you might have been pessimistic and said there’s no hope. But these days, some of our very biggest companies are acting remarkably cleanly. And in some cases, although not all cases, the CEOs are the driving forces behind that.
The important word there isВ inspire. The key difference between managers and leaders is that managers tell people what to do, while leaders inspire them to do it. Inspiration comes from three things: clarity of one’s vision, courage of their conviction and the ability to effectively communicate both of those things.
CEOs resign when the internal dynamics of the company and the external dynamics of the company actually come together to say it is appropriate. When the internal dynamics ask you whether you have a replacement. I think the transition from CEOships have also become cartoonish.
When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
A risk-taking environment starts at the top of a corporation. If the CEO doesn’t have this spirit, chances are you won’t find it anywhere else in the organization.
America isn’t Congress. America isn’t Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.
When I was president of the company, I said, ‘Okay, I can do this – piece of cake.’ Then when you are the CEO, the responsibilities multiply enormously because you worry about everything.
People ask my mother whether she had any idea that I’d be CEO of a company some day, and she would say, ‘Absolutely not. Totally out of the realm of possibility.’ There was certainly nothing that would have been very predictable in my upbringing.
A lot of people thought Steve Jobs was a CEO of Apple but he never was until he came back to Apple in 1997.
Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.
In a company where tech decisions were still ultracentralized, the repercussions of a distracted CEO had to be damaging.
Asset management CEOs globally are looking at their business models. They’re looking at costs, they’re looking at making their businesses more efficient, because they’re seeing revenues under pressure all over the world.
Vote to stand tall against terrorists ; receive Social Security privatization . Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes , in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.
If you, as CEO, have recognized an approach as being the right one, you have to pursue it consistently, even if some people disagree. But it is now clear to everyone that we, as an automaker, have no alternative but to take [environmental protection] course.
The president of the United States is a commander-in-chief, and the president of the United States, you know, executes the laws and tries to motivate the American public to make changes that are necessary. It’s not necessarily a CEO type of position.
“Job Killer.” Those are the two words you are most likely to hear uttered by most American CEOs when confronted with proposals to enact family-friendly work policies.
As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.
Carli Fiorina says companies are consolidating because it’s the only way to compete with big, corrupt government. “This is how socialism starts.” Is that also why she bought Compaq when she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard?
It means everything for me to serve as the CEO of a convention.
For CEOs today, it’s all about acheieving growth and efficiency through innovation. It’s not about product innovation so much anymore as about innovating business models. process, culture and management.
What a bunch of garbage, liberal, Democratic, conservative, Republican, it’s all there to control you, two sides of the same coin! Two management teams, bidding for control of the CEO job of Slavery Incorporated!
Well, the manhunt continues for that elusive evil mastermind, but I’m telling you Enron CEO Kenneth Lay remains at large.
On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with Administration officials. In the course of that meeting, they requested that I “step aside” as CEO of GM, and so I have.
The financial time frame always has been short-term. Projects with long-term paybacks are cut back, because CEOs and financial managers simply want to take their money and run. That is the financial mentality.
When I started working, women were working at 59 cents to the dollar. We got a raise, but it’s still unfair. We’re still 16 percent of Congress, even though we’re 51 percent of the population. We’re a low percentage of our CEOs. We’re a low percentage of boards and being part of boards.
We also believe candour benefits us as managers. The CEO who misleads often in public eventually misleads himself in private.
One of the most important things for any leader is to never let anyone else define who you are. And you define who you are. I never think of myself as being a woman CEO of this company. I think of myself as a steward of a great institution.
The United States is like a big company, and we need a CEO to run it.
Prosperity can’t be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers. Democracy can’t be just for billionaires and corporations. Prosperity and democracy are part of your basic bargain, too.
At the end of the day, both men and women who become CEOs have showed tenacity and hard work to succeed in their careers. It takes not just skills but also extreme dedication and commitment. And regardless of gender, CEOs are measured by the same criteria – the growth and success of the business.
I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more than that. That’s always been my competitive advantage.
Stakeholders – meaning workers and community – the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management but why does there have to be management? Why not have the stakeholders run the industry?
What is success? I think the most important thing is to achieve what you set out to achieve. Just being a CEO in itself is not success. I would not relate success to a title or a position. My career has had a level of serendipity all along. I’ve never planned anything out more than a few years.
I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.
‘What’s your favorite position?’ ‘CEO.’
I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
I’m not sure I was a typical head of a company. Most people that run big companies come out of sales and they come out of marketing and they’re quite serious and they have MBA’s from very good schools and things like that. I’m an accidental CEO, thank the Disney Company.
It’s pretty rare to have CEOs or high level executives at big companies who are social activists. They tend not to be drawn to those areas of life.
You don’t see a lot of MBAs as CEOs. The MBAs tend to get hired by the CEOs.
A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.
Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth.It is this: the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status and happiness in life.
Being a CEO used to be something you did for 15 years. Now you do it for five, maybe. The lifespan is getting shorter and shorter, regardless if you are a man or a woman.
In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.
CEOs of large corporations earn 400 times what their workers make. That is not what America is supposed to be about.
I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That’s a pretty cool first name, isn’t it, Mayo. Pass the Mayo.
The deck is still stacked in favor of those already at the top. And there’s something wrong with that. There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker.
President Trump is not a representative of the political establishment class. And so for whatever reason, people have made a decision that they want to eject him. It’s almost like he’s opened up the door now for America’s CEOs and America’s billionaires to enter the Washington political system.
My answer to those who oppose my appointment as CEO is that this is really a decision of the YWCA. They want to strengthen their grassroots to advocate on behalf of women’s and children‘s empowerment and ending racism.
The problem with New Year‘s resolutions – and resolutions to ‘get in better shape‘ in general, which are very amorphous – is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO – you’ll quit.
The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work
By the time I stepped down as Xerox’s CEO in 2009 – and as chairman in January 2010 – Xerox had become the vibrant, profitable and revitalized company that it still is today. What made the difference was a strong turnaround plan, dedicated people and a firm commitment from company leaders.
When I look at founders and CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, these are companies that are creating extraordinary social good and extraordinary economic and educational empowerment, all within with context of a for-profit model.
A company does better the less it pays the CEO.
Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I’ve pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world.
Power relations between men and women must change profoundly, men must be partners in the pursuit of gender equality, in their decision-making roles, as heads of state, CEOs, religious and cultural leaders, and as partners and parents.
Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing…
I think there’s a lot we could do that maybe would give a little more decision space to CEOs, to shareholders who want to hold for the long term, to investors who want to be part of the long term, that they would maybe have a little more room to withstand the pressure that is otherwise coming down on them.
Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.
Today, the United States is No. 1 in corporate profits, No. 1 in CEO salaries, No. 1 in childhood poverty and No. 1 in income and wealth inequality in the industrialized world.
Of the 50 largest companies in the United States, you are the only woman CEO. Why?
There are pros and cons of experience. A con is that you can’t look at the business with a fresh pair of eyes and as objectively as if you were a new CEO. Fire yourself on a Friday night and come in on Monday morning as if a search firm put you there as a turn-around leader. Can you be objective and make the bold change?
We ought to start running the government like a private-sector business. I have that ability as CEO of our companies. I have line item vetoes, and if I didn’t, we’d probably be out of business by now.
Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.
If you gave me the choice of being CEO of General Electric or IBM or General Motors, you name it, or delivering papers, I would deliver papers. I would. I enjoyed doing that. I can think about what I want to think. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.
CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That’s one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They’re similar societies and it’s bad enough there, but here we’re in the stratosphere. ] There’s no particular reason for it.
Most of the drug CEOs I know, they’re not themselves – they’re what people want them to be. It’s pretty obvious of the different drug executives. They’re old white men, very buttoned up. They’re appropriate, so to speak. I’m a little bit more irreverent, and I’m not going to change just because I have this job.
I’m so glad I didn’t become a doctor, because I do more than any doctor can do. I am an administrator, a CEO, doctor, psychiatrist, an activist, a campaign funder. I think I did well.
The president [of American research institute] can act as the CEO and make a firm decision about the long-term development of the institution, but he or she does so in constant consultation with the faculty. It may not always work this way, but the greatest advances occur when governance is truly shared.
If I invest in a CEO, I need him or her to have experience in sales.
CEOs are no different than the guy in the mailroom. They all have to learn how to manage better the risk created by our increasingly risk-shifting world.
People often say to me, “How come you don’t want to be CEO of a company?” And I tell them, “I don’t want to.” I know I can do it, but I don’t enjoy it. Why does that have to be the definition of success?
The best way to be productive is to have a great team. So I spend more time than most CEOs on human resources. That’s 20 percent of my week.
Every time you’re directing a movie you’re kind of building a temporary business. You’re hiring all these heads of departments, and it definitely feels like I’m like a CEO of a very temporary company.
‘The Week’ is my favourite magazine. Everyone from presidents to CEOs of companies love it, politicians, people in the massive charity business in America, in the arts and even more especially in the media.
I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
The CEO’s role in raising a company’s corporate IQ is to establish an atmosphere that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration.
For a hot-shot CEO taking over a troubled company, mass firings are the ultimate quick fix, the accounting equivalent of crack: cheap, easy to score, instantly gratifying, and highly addictive.
The best way to deal in a transparent world is just be transparent. Let your life be authentic and let people look in. Because if they want to find out, they’re gonna find out. And so to me it’s given me a greater sense of accountability as a CEO. It’s given me a greater opportunity to lead.
I never set out to be CEO. I always set out to be a good team member, a good colleague.
We’re going to let foreign corporations and their CEO’s decide the outcomes of the [presidential elections] you just can’t do this.
We have to fundamentally rethink our trade policy and make it work not for the CEOs of large corporations, but for working people. So, if Trump wants to develop a rational trade policy which demands corporations start investing in this country, rather than China, that’s something that we can work on.
Companies who have been able to groom CEOs internally have done significantly better. We came to the conclusion that the quality of several of the reviewed internal candidates was so high that it did not merit to go outside.
I hated being a public company CEO.
The pending merger with XM will offer unprecedented choice for consumers and create tremendous value for stockholders.
This book [ “Win”] is based on the interviews with three dozen Fortune 400 – or Forbes 400, the richest people, and a couple dozen of the top CEOs.I wanted to know what language they use to be successful, and I wanted to know the attributes that could then be applied to the average individual.
The sport [football] is simply more and more identified with violence, both in its inherent nature and in its savage personnel… [The National Football League] now needs a guardian, not a CEO.
If Albert Einstein was right, Cal Ripken should have been a CEO or politician rather than a shortstop, because Ripken led by example over and over… and over again.
I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow.
Whether you want to be the top violinist or a CEO, strangely enough, hard work and perseverance can overcome a lot of things.
My wife is the CEO of the family. I’m the fun guy, just trying to make it up as I go along.
I think if there’s any difference between me and a traditional CEO, it’s that I’ve been unwilling to change myself or shape my personality around what’s expected.
The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
Just because you are CEO, don’t think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I’ve never forgotten that.
Any CEO who cannot clearly articulate the intangible assets of his brand and understand its connection to customers, is in trouble.
When the CEO makes a decision, people don’t come back on it.
When you’re young and you have money, you become the CEO, automatically, of life, of your family.
Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.
