Top 264 CEOs Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

We are beginning to see a fundamental outrage at the whole interconnected mess of a system: at energy companies who record massive profits, yet allow pensioners to struggle to stay warm in winter; at CEOs who can earn up to a 1,000 times the salary of their average worker; and soon, any day now, at those politicians who allowed this to happen.

You can't predict the future, and you've got to go with your gut on these things, and I'm sure if you speak to a laundry list of CEOs and people who have gone through the startup process themselves, they'll say it's an endless hurdle race, and you are inevitably going to catch your legs on hurdles, and it's just how you roll with that.

I know a few CEOs who delegate the understanding of their financials and their business metrics to the CFO, and then stop worrying about all that 'numbers stuff.' Don't do that. You have to know your numbers inside and out - they are your life blood.

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.

Visionary CEOs don't need someone else to demo the company's key products for them. They deeply understand products, and they have their own coherent and consistent vision of where the industry/business models and customers are today, and where they need to take the company.

If you want to think of a company as a system, design the system to benefit all. So how can you raise wages, increase training, and reduce carbon, and provide low-prices? We believe that it's possible to deliver, and I find a lot of other likeminded CEOs, as it relates to thinking that way.

My job is to find great ideas, exaggerate them, and spread them like hell around the business with the speed of light...And to put resources in to support them. Keep finding ideas. That's the job of just about all of our CEOs.

The number of CEOs voluntarily leaving their jobs or being forced out spiked early. Many of those companies will be turning to an interim CEO to take the reins. These temporary leaders are increasingly in demand, according to those who watch corner office trends.

The good doctor reassured John these were people who put their psychopathy to good use. They lived productive, well-adjusted lives as surgeons, CEOs and ambulance drivers. The light bulb went on. The CSC [Correctional Service of Canada] doesn't have to go through all these gyrations to reprogram anyone, they just have to find every inmate the right job!

Certainly political capital-slash-celebrity attention, whatever you want to call it, certainly is part of the reason why I've been reaching out to CEOs. There's a lot of folks who probably would have taken a call from me before but are even more inclined now and are interested in what we're doing because of all the attention.

Our model is very, very different to LinkedIn. We only deal with very small companies. We don't have any support for recruiters. In fact, recruiters are not supposed to be on AngelList Talent. It's a direct market where we connect CEOs and the founders and the head of products with their talent directly.

'Commercial' is not the word that has to be said only by CEOs. It has to be something that is maybe the essence of design, because design has some sort of art in it and creation, but it's also some object that you have to use. There is also this pragmatic end to it.

I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families - and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.

Ride It' did it for me. Not only did the Asian community love it, but the black community and the white community got to hear about it. The song became such a big hit for me and got me noticed by the CEOs of Cash Money in America.

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.

CEOs are often chief product officers. But for me to say I'm a chief product officer when my product is a community, I really should be thinking of myself as head of this community.

You can stay too long in a job, that's for sure. But by the same token, in the 12 years I have been CEO of GE, there have been four CEOs of Toshiba. So there's too short a time to do it, and there's too long a time to do it.

I realized that in all the sectors of society where there's a huge gender disparity, the one place that can be fixed overnight is onscreen. You think about getting half of Congress, or the presidency ... It's going to take a while no matter how hard we work on it. But half of the board members and half of the CEOs can be women in the next movie somebody makes; it can be absolutely half.

We became a congresswoman, a stay-at-home mom, a filmmaker, and a journalist. And Lino and I taught our children that they could rise to even greater heights. They could become surgeons, CEOs, supreme court justices, secretary of state, and even president of the United States. We didn't teach our daughters that they were second-class citizens.

Corporate leaders surely have their problems, I believe that most CEOs are doing their best to hew to the ethical line. The problem is that that line has gotten blurred and that our moral standard seems to be "if everybody else is doing it, it's okay". That's not good enough for me.

I draw the line at some things. Some things I won't do for any amount of money. Like for instance, there's a couple of CEOs of very large corporations that offered me lots of money to do special pictures for them. And I just refused to do that. Even if it was a million dollars I wouldn't do it.

Donald Trump hasn't been specific, but if you go back over some of the campaign rhetoric, well, obviously, there's the bully pulpit, just publicly shaming out-sourcing companies. And that again is not new to Trump. If you remember, back in 2004, John Kerry was making noises about Benedict Arnold CEOs in a similar context. So, that's got a long and gloried tradition.

The NBA's a Fortune 500 company. That's how you look at it. And all the other Fortune 500 companies out there in the world, you don't see their CEOs and COOs going to work with white tees and baggy clothes and stuff like that. So I have to take that same approach.

Trade is the key to the economic outlook in Britain and the E.U. Many corporate chieftains joined large bank CEOs and the fearmongering IMF to suggest that the E.U. will deal harshly with Britain if it leaves and stop all trade. That's mutually assured destruction - MAD.

I think that's the responsibility of the CEO and the CEOs below me: to make sure that we're constantly putting people in places where they have the opportunity to develop into those careers but also having a rewards and recognition system that allows a great programmer to stay as a great programmer.

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.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

When you have two people challenge for the same job and you keep them both and call them co-CEOs, or the whole fiasco of a 'merger of equals'... there is no such a thing. So if there should be dreams of dual leadership, the chances of success are limited. But Bernie [Ecclestone] is still at the top of his game I have noticed.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, CEOs are under pressure from all sides, and executives have all sorts of people pushing and pulling at them. But too often, they begin to view and treat their teams, and especially their assistants, as appliances. And a good assistant knows that the last thing their boss wants to hear from them is a personal complaint about anything.

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.

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

When I started to go out there and listen to different startups or different CEOs talk about how you build this company from a two-person team to a team of 500, I really just stepped back and was like, 'Well, it's not necessarily a business, but football has a lot of similarities to that.'

I advise other companies' CEOs, don't fall into the trap where you go, 'Where's the growth? Where's the growth?' Where's the growth?' They feel a tremendous pressure to grow. Well, sometimes you can't grow. Sometimes you don't want to grow. In certain businesses, growth means you either take on bad clients, excess risk, or too much leverage.

Sociopaths are more complicated psychopaths; the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is a sociopath is incredibly charming. There are a lot of sociopaths that are CEOs. They don't necessarily kill people but they're able to walk into a big social function and make everybody think they're the kindest, coolest, smartest, most interesting person in the room.

Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It's just cultural. People just don't want to do it.

If I get asked to talk to a group of CEOs or a group of high school students, I pick high school students.

Once America's CEOs get back to the business of growing their companies rather than growing their share prices, shareholder value will take care of itself, and all Americans will share in the higher wages and other benefits of a renewed era of economic growth.

Maybe back in the day you didn't need to be the greatest looking to be on TV and you didn't need to speak the best, but in this day and age, I think you need to be the package. You need to look the part for your sponsors, you need to be able to speak the part for the media and to big CEOs.

Look around. Oil companies guzzle down the billions in profits. Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, and Wall Street CEOs, the same ones the direct our economy and destroyed millions of jobs still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them. Does anyone here have a problem with that?

As a CEO, you get sucked into dealing with all the tasks of being a CEO. There's a big meeting, a big discussion, and you get into all the big issues, which is your job. But what CEOs often lose sight of is that it's all about the people who work for you. For every 1,000 decisions, 999 were being made when I was not in the room.

There's most definitely a Davos bubble. You're in a small Alpine town that, for just four days in January, sees its population tripled with world leaders, CEOs, media, police, the army... and a whole bunch of people who aren't invited but just come to hang out.

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.

The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to affect employees.

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.

A company logo may be the last thing cost-conscious CEOs focus on when they're looking to jump-start growth. Which is perhaps why it took more than two decades for White Mountain Footwear, a privately held shoe manufacturer based in Lisbon, N.H., to finally give its own emblem some serious thought.

Daniel Goleman has proven that two-thirds of the success in business is based upon our Emotional Intelligence as opposed to our IQ or our level of experience. As we look for the next crop of future CEOs, maybe it's time for America's corporations to start interviewing grads from the psychology master's programs rather than the M.B.A. programs.

Success is no longer about changing strategies more often, but having the agility to execute multiple strategies concurrently. And success requires CEOs to develop the right leadership capabilities, workforce skills, and corporate cultures to support digital transformation.

Most CEOs walk around the office like we own the place, without realizing that the place itself isn't worth owning: a business's value comes from the people who walk out the door every night, who have to decide each morning whether to walk back in. One of the simplest things you can do as a leader is honor their choice and appreciate their work.

I think to some degree one of the strengths of the high tech industry is that people are actually willing to tell you things. When I went to Novell, I didn't know how to be a CEO, so I went in and I called all sorts of CEOs I knew. I called in a favor. I wanted to come by and listen to them tell me what it's like to be a CEO.

I was with top CEOs in 2009, and they were clearly shaken. Top leaders of Wall Street and elsewhere, shaken. The ones at the top did get by because if they are seeing a decline somewhere, there is also growth elsewhere, like in emerging economies.

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.

Boundaries are shifting between work and the rest of life for men and for women at different life stages. Work is becoming home and home is becoming work. The progressive CEOs who grasp this emergent reality and adjust to embrace it will be at a competitive advantage in the marketplace for talent.

It could happen to anyone when you get hired by a different president. There's a difference in philosophies. It happens. It's a change in CEOs. They have their own people, their own philosophies, and it's different than what Bob stands for.

The NBAs a Fortune 500 company. Thats how you look at it. And all the other Fortune 500 companies out there in the world, you dont see their CEOs and COOs going to work with white tees and baggy clothes and stuff like that. So I have to take that same approach.

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?

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.

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.