Top 709 CEO Quotes & Sayings - Page 11

When the iPhone was first announced, CEO Steve Jobs spewed enough BS to cover a football field full of babies 3 feet deep in bullshit, which sounds cool because he could have potentially murdered a football field full of babies, but he passed on this opportunity by introducing the phone instead.

I have spent some time talking to Rex Tillerson. He's an amazing human being. He's an American success story, not just in his business life. He's a rags-to-riches success story. He stated working at 8, lived in a one-bedroom house until the time he went to college, and grew to become the CEO of one of the world's largest companies.

When I returned as CEO in 2008, Starbucks had forgotten that meaningful innovations balance an organization's heritage with modern-day relevance and market differentiation, so we had to reorient. In one brainstorming session, we visited and observed great retailers, then asked ourselves, 'If Starbucks did not exist, what type of coffee experience would we create?

The CEO's job is always about leadership. It's about leadership in a vision, in terms of where you're going, it's about making sure that you have the right organization and staff, and that you have kind of clearly communicated what some of the plays are and what some of the goals are in terms of the business and how do you organize together in order to make that happen.

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.

I was brought in by the White House as GM's chairman in 2009, around the time of the bankruptcy, and became CEO later that year. As a company, we were grateful for the government's support. But as GM's financial health began to improve, I could detect no real sense of urgency, or even interest, on the part of the government to relinquish control.

I love the fact that I'm in New York, because I'm away from all of that. It's very unusual for any of my counterparts here in New York to talk about domestic issues. I enjoy not having to be close to those things in DC. But what I can tell you is the president Donald Trump is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants. That's his right. Whether you agree with it or not, it's the truth.

I'm the CEO of A$AP Worldwide. But as you can see, when I'm with them, everybody's equal. We don't really base our love off of finances or who's superior by financial status. We're all equal. When I'm with them, I'm letting them shine 'cause it's just like how it used to be. They still there. I'm just chilling out front.

While it is almost certainly true that leaders ought to eat last, the evidence on the ever-widening difference between CEO and average employee pay and the enormous severance packages leaders obtain even as front-line workers see their economic well-being eviscerated makes a mockery of the idea that leaders do anything other than take care of themselves.

The white worker who has been displaced at General Motors has more in common with the displaced black worker than those larger white CEO's, and those Wall Street people who are determining their fate... whose thievery and greed is determining their fate.

People feel like there're two systems of justice, you know? Over there at Wells Fargo, you know, you had the scandal going on there, but the CEO leaves with a big, giant package. And other folks get in a whole lot of trouble for doing a lot less. The truth is that we have got to make America work for working people again.

I can't tell you how many board meetings I've been in where the CEO is anguished over the impacts on morale that cost cutting or layoffs will bring about. You know what hurts morale even more than cost-cutting and layoffs? Going out of business.

Former Enron founder Ken Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling found guilty in the Enron case. Ken Lay is so guilty I'm surprised people aren't calling him Congressman Ken Lay. Wait 'till these guys find out in prison that insider trading has a whole new meaning.

Be kind to each other. You never know who's going to become the CEO of what. You never know who is going to become Taylor Swift. You never know.

The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.

I've been meeting with Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino for years, trying to figure out how to fix the concert industry. We're all so overpaid. It's ridiculous. People stopped going to concerts because they can't afford them. The Rolling Stones are charging $650 per ticket! That just makes me speechless. I love the Stones, but I won't be attending.

Compensation needs to be predominately performance-driven. If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars.

2009 was one of the busiest, most insane, stressful periods in my entire career. I was raising a bunch of money, buying a bunch of Twitter. I saw my friend fired as CEO of Twitter. Uber was growing like a weed. As these companies get bigger and bigger, there's more and more friction. Being public was the last thing I wanted to do at the time.

Very rarely are you going to see the large shareholder or CEO of a corporation march into a newsroom and say, "Cover this story, don't cover that." It's a much more subtle process. The professional code adapts, but what we try to see, is how commercial and corporate pressure shape both the professional code and the sorts of things that are considered legitimate journalism and illegitimate journalism.

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 think we have lost our way when people like the [board of] governors and the CEO of the NYSE fail to realize they have a duty to the rest of us to act as exemplars... You do not want your first-grade school teacher to be fornicating on the floor or drinking booze in the classroom; similarly you do not want your stock exchange to be setting the wrong moral example.

You look at Donald Trump and Ben Carson and you can see the people supporting them are small donors, the people I always call the ones who make the country work. Certainly not rich corporate CEO types, and these are not people that expect some sort of issue oriented payback. They're donating because of enthusiasm, ideas. The corporate donors are donating 'cause they want policy in return.

We are not going to let it happen where [foreign corporations and their CEO's ] decide the outcome of our elections. They can't do it and we're not going to let it happen. This is our last chance to save our country and reclaim it for we the people, and it's going to happen.

I've never isolated role models based on gender. I have more male role models due to the mere fact that I've done business with more of them and they're leaders within the verticals I work. Of those, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, is an entrepreneur and personal friend that I have a great deal of respect for.

Talking about Apple v. Microsoft without mentioning the Internet and the browser is like talking about WWII without talking about the nuke. Framing the conversation just in terms of open v. closed operating systems, the quality of the hardware or software or who the CEO was, is silly.

If you spend your time away from work looking at emails and making sure your inbox went down to zero, that's not an effective way to spend your time as a CEO or an entrepreneur. Often times, those emails aren't that important.

Synergies are something that the CEO basically has to force to happen, because organizations are, generally, like bodies in motion that tend to stay in motion. It's very hard to get big organizations to change. And it takes really a very powerful mandate to force things to happen.

People are kind of upset with British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward. Over the weekend, he was out on his yacht. And when President Obama found out that Tony Hayward was on his yacht, he was so angry, he missed a putt.

The banks don't have anything - no rights whatsoever. The banks are shareholders of SLEC, and SLEC has no rights. I am the CEO of Formula One Management and Formula One Administration, which runs the business in F1. From this point of view, I own F1.

Getting fired can produce a particularly bountiful payday for a CEO. Indeed, he can 'earn' more in that single day, while cleaning out his desk, than an American worker earns in a lifetime of cleaning toilets. Forget the old maxim about nothing succeeding like success: Today, in the executive suite, the all-too-prevalent rule is that nothing succeeds like failure.

My passion is music, you know, and music influences culture, influences lifestyle, which leads me to 'Roc-A-Wear'. I was forced to be an entrepreneur, so that led me to be CEO of 'Roc-A-Fella' records, which lead to Def Jam.

There are four different kinds of power in a communication: position power (the CEO talking to her direct reports), emotion power (passion sometimes rules the day), expertise (people often listen to the most knowledgeable person in the room), and conversational power (the subtlest, this is the ability to direct the conversation through body language).

No one wanted to be my friend because of my lunchbox - because I never shared my lunchbox. One day the principal walked in and said, 'No one is friends with Karan Johar; who will be his friend?' My CEO today put his hand up there and said, he will.

You have to imagine a world in which there's this abundance of data, with all of these connected devices generating tons and tons of data. And you're able to reason over the data with new computer science and make your product and service better. What does your business look like then? That's the question every CEO should be asking.

American business would be run better today if there was more alignment between CEOs' interest and the company. For example, would the financial crisis of 2008 have occurred if the CEO of Lehman and Morgan Stanley and Goldman and Citibank had to take a very small percentage of every mortgage-backed security... or every loan they made?

Those who dismiss rappers as vulgar outsiders miss the way that Jay-Z and Kanye embody the American dream: starting from humble beginnings, both rose by dint of hard work and talent to wealth and success. Jay embraces this role, styling himself as much a CEO as an artist, and he and Beyoncé have become, in a significant way, more fully America's first couple than their friends the Obamas.

For every grand and finely worded statement by the CEO, the brand is also defined by derisory consumer comments overheard in a hallway, or in a chat room on the Internet. Brands are sponges for content, for images, for fleeting feelings. They become psychological concepts held in the minds of the public, where they may stay forever. As such you can’t entirely control a brand. At best you can only guide and influence it.

Former Sony CEO Amy Pascal - they threw her out of the headquarters, but they gave her a new office on the lot. But she can't move into it because it reeks of pot smoke. Apparently, this is true, the former tenant was Seth Rogan. And he, as we know, smokes so much weed, when he finally exhales, it looks like there's a new pope.

I will say that going to these meetings and things, you know, I thought that, you know, be in a room with a bunch of drunk people. Ugh! I can't do that. And the truth is, it is the cheapest therapy that you could ever get. You're in a group of people that are from all walks of life, you know. Some guy that's got, you know, construction stuff on and dust still on, to a person that's the CEO of a company. And it's a common - it's a common abyss that you shared.

We need to have honest conversations among women and men to say how do we stop blaming each other? Because I'm not saying that every woman wants to be a corporate CEO. We need so that the women who are corporate CEOs get supported and they're not looking askance or down at women who make other choices in life.

He [Osama bin Laden] is clearly an odd combination of a 12th-century theologian and a 21st-century CEO. He runs an absolutely unique organization in the Islamic world. It's multiethnic, multilinguistic, multinational. He is a combat veteran, three times wounded. He has a huge reputation in the Islamic world for generosity and leadership. He's a man who speaks eloquent, almost poetic Arabic, according to Bernard Lewis.

I mean loyalty - you know, look, first we serve the people. I've always looked at that. You serve the people first. But having said that, you never forget who's in charge. You never forget who the CEO of a country is when you decide to serve. And so everyone works at the pleasure of the president. And that's what, you know, we have to remember is if he doesn't feel comfortable, he can do something about it.

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 admire companies that have a purpose, passion, and performance. I am a fan of Unilever under its CEO Paul Polman, not only for the company's insights into women and men when they buy beauty products or skin products (the DOVE woman, the AXE man), but also as a company seeking to achieve both growth and practicing social responsibility.

American managers often say they would like to pay their employees more, they argue that they can't afford to do so and, at the same time, keep the prices of their products competitive. As one CEO recently explained, "I would treat my employees as well as Starbuck's treats theirs, if I could charge the equivalent for my product of three dollars for a cup of latte!"

The question was, in a sense, at Princeton Review, how much value was I adding as a public company CEO. I was adding less than other people might've... I think you want to move on when you've given your best work and then feel that you're not going to add as much value moving forward.

There’s no question that mistakes were made and as CEO, I have to accept responsibility for those mistakes. I was focused on lowering costs and making the hospitals more efficient. I could have had more internal and external controls. I learned hard lessons and I’ve taken that lesson and it’s helped me become a better business person and a better leader.

Political journalists love graduate student intelligence, the ability to make clever allusions in seminars, and in 1999-2000, they hassled George W Bush for not having it. They didn't realise what this book succinctly displays: that the president has something far more important - CEO intelligence, the ability to ask tough questions, garner essential information and make discerning decisions.

After a long investigation the SEC has fined Halliburton $7.5 million for issuing fraudulent statements exaggerating their profits in 1998 and 1999 during which their CEO was - oh who was it? Oh that's right. ... Cheney himself has not been implicated in the scandal and according to Cheney's lawyer there is no allegation whatsoever that he acted in any way other than in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. And you know what? It's still true today.

I was forced to be an artist and a CEO from the beginning, so I was forced to be like a businessman because when I was trying to get a record deal, it was so hard to get a record deal on my own that it was either give up or create my own company.

And they just slam the door. And they don't peek into that land any more. And they forget that teens and tweens are people, absolutely just as much as adults are. And their problems may play out on a smaller scale, but the things they go through are equally as valid as a CEO trying to figure out how to deal with a crisis at work. I just write for teens because I love 'em.

Since United States military operations in Iraq began in 2003, I have visited Iraq at least 15 times. But unlike politicians who visit, the question for me has never been why the U.S. got into Iraq. Instead, as the CEO of Blackwater, the urgent question was how the company I head could perform the duties asked of us by the U.S. State Department.

Smart tech investor thinks about: a) future product roadmap, b) bottoms-up market size & growth, c) talent and skill of team. Essentially you are valuing things that have not yet happened, and the likelihood of the CEO and team being able to make them happen. Finance people find this appalling, but investors who do this well can make a lot of money.

This is what income inequality means in America, and why the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider. According to a recent study, CEO pay is now 295 times more than the pay of a typical worker. In 1965, the differential was 20 times. We must create an economy that works for all, not just the top 1%.

I was working with an extraordinarily successful company that was doing a CEO succession, and the board was discussing the threats to the business. They were enormous, despite the company's strong market position. I then realized that there were no longer just turn-around periods for companies in trouble, that now variables that could drastically effect any business's profitability were not going to go away.

Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.

The administration must act promptly to ensure that the central premise of the Affordable Care Act is executable and, rather than dismissing criticism, should examine it in good faith and work to serve the needs of the people. President Obama must approach this problem like a CEO confronting a very bad product launch.

After Pixar's 2006 merger with the Walt Disney Company, its CEO, Bob Iger, asked me, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other Pixar senior managers to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization.

My wife, well she has extensive experience, because before becoming the first lady, she was the wife of the CEO of a large conglomerate. So I have very high hopes that she will carry out her job successfully as first lady of the Republic of Korea.

You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.