Ceos Quotations

I'm on the Business Roundtable, the CEOs of the largest 100-odd companies in the country. Most of these people wanted very much to be the CEO of a large public company but realize that it's not exactly what they had anticipated, for lots of reasons. One is competition has gotten a lot worse, and more global.

I started doing motivational tours. I've seen all kinds of people, from the CEOs to the lowest executive, opening up to their fears. We don't introspect as much as we should.

No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.

I don't feel I'm at liberty to speak about the actions of any one CEO. That's not fair; given CEOs have duties to their shareholders.

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.

CEOs who can hire properly, that's the most important part of the job. The CEO's job is really to hire the right team and execute the vision second.

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.

The shining star in the world is Shanghai. That's what CEOs from big companies say - 'if I want mathematical analytical work done, it's done in China.'

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.

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.

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.

ObamaCare is working. I talk to a lot of CEOs of hospitals. It is working.

Errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumours, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to engage in needless wars, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children.

Working with people from all walks of life, from full-time moms to CEOs at large companies, I've distilled many universal truths about success. There's a secret I've learned that works quite well at helping you to achieve what you want: Decide what you want.

CEOs make hard decisions; sometimes, the least worst is the right one.

We're in a culture where women really aren't equal. How many CEOs are women? Over the years we have seen the ability of women to get higher in the pecking order, but we've gotten complacent. Women make 73 percent of what men make.

We believe that both BellSouth and Qwest will move ahead with their own terrestrial video strategy in 2006. We believe that recent comments by the CEOs of BellSouth and Qwest support our view and suggest a more favorable outlook towards facilities-based video.

Whenever teenage girls and corporate CEOs covet the same new technology, something extraordinary is happening.

When four of ten CEOs (40 per cent) believe that there could be a major economic downturn in the next two years, might be the proverbial canary in the mine. The strength of the Canadian dollar and its impact on manufacturing and exports plus the ascendancy of China and India as major global economic players may be putting a degree of caution into the air in what has been to date a robust outlook. Time will tell.

There are fewer and fewer corporate CEOs who seem bullish on their own business.

We hope to make the point that CEOs need to be personally engaged in information security as a strategic issue.

Yes, it is true there is office space in the hospital, but the CEOs calculations are that it will cost at least R7 million to renovate them.

Like a quarterback for a football team, CEOs get to take all of the credit when things go well and have to take all of the blame when things go badly. Yet legally, they are not held accountable. When a quarterback fumbles, throws a few interceptions, maybe even throws the game, the coach has a responsibility to bench him, so that no more follies will occur.

Luxury CEOs need to know how the target market perceives their brand's reputation and that of their competitors' (LBSI), and how customers rate their brand experience and competitors' experiences (LCEI).

Lee Raymond really set the standard for other CEOs in the industry. Everybody else copied Lee Raymond, but you can't duplicate what he's done.

Poker is both math and instinct, and CEOs understand the bottom line and the odds. But knowing the numbers is not enough, they have to know how to read people, something they do every day in the boardroom.

I would be keen to meet with CEOs and other top executives of U.S.-based petroleum companies during this visit. I have separately requested the USIBC (U.S.-India Business Council) to organize an event, wherein this interaction could take place.

CEOs will rarely admit it in public, but privately they say they're worried about having enough qualified people to fill leadership roles as baby boomers retire. So more big companies now are actively analyzing where the gaps are likely to be, and which skills they need to be giving people the chance to develop right now.

CEOs of many corporations have begun to get the message that if the federal government continues to cut back on research funding, then this innovation is not going to happen any more, because these companies cannot afford to fund all the basic exploratory research that's needed at the front end.

CEOs normally don't take a month off at a time, but Scott doesn't really run Wal-Mart. Thousands of people run Wal-Mart. The captain of a naval carrier can sleep a bit while the crew works.

CEOs must personally involve themselves in security and privacy. I think legislation in this case should be generally a last resort.

CEOs get their jollies from the good performance of their company, ... That's where you get your kicks. It's not from an extra million you made from a performance bonus. I really believe that.

CEOs are no longer willing to arbitrate between departments and IT. They just want revenues and profit. They might say they want something coordinated, but more important, they just want it done.

CEOs are highly skilled people like a pro athlete or artist, selling a skill, ... It?s very hard to put a monetary value on a skill, but a good quarterback makes $10 million a year, based on an athletic skill, in the same way a painting might bring in $10 million to an artist.

CEOs and employers at for-profit corporations should not be able to prevent women from access to health care simply because of their own personal religious objections.

CEOs and directors realize that board discussions are richer when individuals with diverse backgrounds and perspectives participate. The challenge is finding qualified women and minority candidates. Boards have a responsibility to shareholders to align the composition of the board with the business strategy by appointing directors who add value to the board and company. But, there is still only a small number of women and minorities among senior corporate executives, and they are in high demand.

Because she sat where she sat, we are now sitting in Congress, ... We are sitting in the Supreme Court. We are sitting as CEOs and heads of universities.

If CEOs are just frozen in fear, ... who's going to go on a spending spree.

From my own personal experience the best CEOs that I have ever known are the ones that don't care very much about the day-to-day fluctuations of their shares.

Going into 2006, America's CEOs believe that the economy will remain resilient despite the challenges of several unanticipated events.

He cares deeply about it in a personal way and has been one of the least reluctant among CEOs to talk about it in a meaningful way.

Half of his pay is dependent on the performance of the company, so that looks pretty reasonable relative to the pay of other CEOs at big companies. It probably doesn't look reasonable to the guy who just got laid off.

There are still some barriers to some particular jobs that are more high paying jobs like high-level executives, CEOs of companies that women just aren't in the proportion that men are in.

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.

Over the past few years, we're talking about a few out of the hundreds and hundreds of CEOs who have been terminated, so it is pretty unusual.

Supply-chain applications are in a trough of disillusionment. CEOs signed off on supply-chain packages a couple years ago and now are beating their heads against the wall, wondering what they bought.

Looking ahead, the CEOs are cautiously optimistic but not as optimistic about the short-term outlook as they were at the end of 2004.

I think people need to be concerned about the length of the technology cycle and the inability of most CEOs and analysts to predict the course of corporate earnings over the next several quarters.

The amount of shareholder wealth that has been transferred from shareholders to CEOs has doubled in the past 10 years.

We are trying to bring e-mail to the masses by taking it out of the realm of just CEOs and the highly-paid sales force.

You are looking at an economy that most CEOs are going to believe will be a good economy for 2006. Most CEOs are saying they are going to spend both on hiring of people and on technology.

We can all argue how we value CEOs and if their pay makes sense. But we chronically overvalue CEOs. Until that's addressed, higher pay will continue.

We want those guys to take advantage of what that market delivers and support them in their ability to deliver it. The last thing that we want to do is start telling our banks' CEOs what they ought to be doing in their markets because we (in Columbus) don't have the market knowledge that they do.

The deal was struck between the two CEOs and in both cases it was sort of a marriage of necessity. But there is no conviction in my soul that Levin understands the Internet age, and unless Case is given the collaboration from Levin to lead into the future, it could drag down the opportunities into the future.

We used to get a response in two or three calls. Now we can call 10 CEOs and not get a response.

We believe that today's actions have disrupted this consortium, ... It is as if we have removed the CEOs of several major corporations who had joined together in a major conspiracy.

We called CEOs of companies and said we'd like to talk.

We were seeing daily announcements of the demise of CEOs in a way that seemed to stand out.

We have been frustrated by privacy conventions and other problems in data gathering. So we decided to design in some techniques that would improve our results. We conducted some user group meetings to understand our buyers' characteristics, whether they were programmers, or CEOs looking for an overview, or users seeking tech support. Our registration rates have more than doubled, and the new navigation process deserves at least partial credit for that.

We have former presidents of companies, CEOs and other responsible positions. They've worked very hard, and they like that we give a hand-up, not a hand-out, because our homeowners work hard to get homes and they have to buy them.

This survey reflects that CEOs are more concerned about the weakness in the economy than they were six months ago.

With CEOs receiving an average $15 million to start, and $16.5 million to finish, ... they hardly need to make any money in between.

We have many women CEOs around the state of Florida. We're seeing that around South Florida, Central Florida.

A stoppage of BlackBerry would cause major havoc. CEOs use them, doctors use them, Wall Street guys use them.

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.

Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office.

European CEOs have to act much more as business politicians ... in the vacuum left over by a world where we have less and less boundaries, less and less power of national governments.

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

They actually challenged me. The CEOs of those nonprofits challenged me to go ahead and see if I could start something like that. So basically I took that challenge.

There won't be a lot of resolutions passed here today, but the key is to get the dialogue open and to get CEOs interested in providing their customers with protection.

The stock market has an opportunity to break upwards if corporate CEOs and CFOs say some good things, or at least some neutral things, about the outlook,

Thanks to the popularity of poker on television, poker is so hot right now among CEOs. They see professional poker players doing what they do every day analyze the odds, review all the options, and make split second decisions. CEOs are naturals at poker.

People understand the product when they see it in the CEOs office and in context and it has been widely successful via word of mouth.

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.

Some expect CEOs to be chained to the desk. Most put in 12 or more hours a day, often working seven days a week. But we should want leaders in high-pressure situations to have time to decompress.

Company CEOs and chief financial officers must vouch for the accuracy of their companies' public statements,

Companies often mention more muted volatility on the NYSE as another reason to list there, but the most common response we have received when discussing listing choices with company CEOs is the brand recognition.

develop leaders of the next generation, and not necessarily CEOs and presidents.

As a company's fortunes fare, so do the CEOs and other top managers, and that is the way it should work in the business world,

Alan is a proven winner in every business he's been involved in. He's turned around Sears credit, he's taken charge of their Internet business and given it life, and he's been able to reorganize their home-services business. Probably the best part about him is he's coming into his position as CEO and he understands how CEOs work, but he doesn't have the emotional bias. He can make a kind of fair assessment about what the customer likes and what he doesn't.

This is a sound contradiction because CEOs should be the visionaries and CFOs should be the bottom line worrywarts, ... Financial officers should be worrying about all of the costs, the pitfalls and the risks.

This is not a right-left, Republican-Democrat, man-woman, old-young issue. Everybody thinks, with some very limited exceptions, that CEOs are overpaid, and because of that, shareholders aren't getting adequate bang for their buck.

It's all happening kind of fast. It's amazing the response we've gotten. It shows that all this has hit a raw, patriotic nerve, and we're attracting a cross-section of America -- everyone from CEOs to coal miners and aerospace engineers to corner-garage mechanics.

It's very clear that CEOs today are looking at new kinds of innovation to drive substantial organizational change and business growth. It's not just product innovation any more. It's about understanding how to innovate a business model, or an operational process, or management behavior -- such as real-time risk management, collaborative pharmaceutical development, or digital film distribution.

For CEOs today, it's all about achieving growth and efficiency through innovation. It's not about product innovation so much anymore as about innovating business models, process, culture and management.

The Number 1 complaint that the concierges get at hotels is against galleries that are not open every evening. A lot of CEOs that are in town for conventions can't get out during the day.

It makes you wonder what really went down with ex-COO Gary Daichendt, who apparently quit in May because he wanted to be CEO but Owens and/or the board showed no sign it was going to happen any time soon. In a nutshell, Owens' departure -- was he fired, pushed or did he resign? -- is another one step forward, two steps back move for Nortel, which has now had three CEOs in the past 18 months.

It's pretty clear that all the pieces for capital spending are in place, including rising sales, lower inventories and increases in shipments and orders, ... So, despite what CEOs say in public, there's no question that capital spending -- outside of aircraft and telecommunications -- has bottomed and is on the way up.

It's something of an uplifting experience for us in the investing community to see that companies really are taking their accounting seriously. An exercise that CEOs seemed to treat as rote and automatic is viewed totally differently.

The best people to go out and talk to CEOs are other CEOs.

The best board members aren't elected by default. CEOs that set themselves up with their choice of board member - which means getting more than one term sheet and doing extensive reference checking - are better off.

The bankruptcy filing and other stock stories are weighing on us a little, and you've got the Federal Reserve meeting and the CEOs signing off on the books hanging over us, but mostly you're seeing stocks a little skittishness after four days of gains last week.

Supposedly, Edison got by on a few hours of sleep. You hear about CEOs of companies boasting about how little sleep they get.

I've had conversations with five CEOs of major casino companies, including Harrah's and MGM and Casino Magic. They tell me they're reluctant to rebuild if the other factors still exist,

This is just corporate propaganda created by CEOs who want a get out of jail free card for corporate negligence.

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.

It's really crazy. You get to meet all the CEOs at Nike. They're making a commitment to all the top high schools in the country. They're taking the top 20 (football) teams in America. They're tapping the high school market. We'll be a Nike team head to toe.

I hope the CEOs of the energy companies use that (hearing) as an opportunity to make their case, tell the story of just what it is they are planning on reinvesting in this sector,

If you wind up with a company that is so closely aligned with one individual, like it or not, the virtues of that company are tied to the virtues of that individual. You're usually much better off with CEOs who are under the radar and just work at doing a very nice job for shareholders.

If you were rating bank CEOs on investing for revenue growth rather than tweaking the existing system, John would rate way up there.