Ceos Quotes

Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.

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?

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.

They want more production and they want it cheaper. But no matter what happens, the creative idea will be perpetuated by somebody who comes up with a vision. I don't care if there are three ceos - it takes one guy with an idea.

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.

The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy.

Someone needs to remind American CEOs that if you can't run a company that is innovative, financially sound and doesn't poison the rest of us, You can't run a company.

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.

Women like myself, CEOs, can pave the way for more women to get to the top.

The helicopter is a fine way to travel, but it induces a view of the world that only God and CEOs share on a regular basis.

I went off to a school with the children of CEOs and diplomats. To be able to be at home with that group of people and at home with the desperately poor has been good for me in preparation for my coming to Washington.

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.

If you look at the CEOs of some the most successful companies in the world like IKEA, they never fly first class. They always go economy.

Am I as experienced, or mature, or smart as others CEOs? No probably not, but there's something, I think, very useful about having a founder as the CEO.

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.

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.

Critics might contend that putting former private-sector CEOs in the president's Cabinet places the fox in the henhouse. But it's unlikely such executives would expose themselves to the headaches if they weren't genuinely motivated by the call to service.

Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs, not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You know, technology CEOs like to think of themselves as rock 'n roll stars.