Quotes from Mark V. Hurd

Executives need ample flexibility to respond to the market. That means both reducing costs and increasing innovation.

References drive the industry.

I really don't want the best people at the highest cost.

Cloud represents the maturation of the IT industry.

In times of crisis, you just have to bear down and lean on your own instincts and your own beliefs and make decisions.

There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.

We make a significant effort at Oracle to focus the organization on making customers successful in how they deploy Oracle technology and transform their business through IT.

CIOs have to be able to lay out a clear path in concert with the business leader - I used to make the business guy responsible for the apps and force them to answer the question of why they feel they need non-standard apps when they know that's how the costs skyrocket.

To be very blunt, I am not really that concerned with what labels get associated with somebody.

Oracle will continue to componentize all of its solutions so we can work in a heterogeneous environment.

I have to put people in the right spot so that if they execute, we win.

From a productivity standpoint, you're supposed to reduce headcount on par with declining revenue. If you believe the environment isn't going to improve, you should take a bigger cut to get in front of the problems.

I grew up in New York City, and I moved to Florida in high school.

It's counterproductive to lower my price, because I have to sell more units to make up for that lost revenue. Generating brand-new products can take a long time. Improving service is typically the quickest way that I can take market share. So aligning technology strategy to better service customers becomes an essential path to revenue growth.

My day starts at 4:30 A.M., and I sort of have two speeds: fast and stop.

I'm old, I'm used to crummy service, I'm trained to get crummy service. To me, the fact I can get through to a call centre and then hold for 15 minutes, I don't get that upset. My kids won't. They want to know the answer to their question now. As a company you have to provide an answer to that consumer.

CIOs have earned a strategic seat at the table, but now they've got to hold that seat - and the only way they can do that is to converse in the language of business value and business benefits and business outcomes that all align perfectly with the strategic agenda of the company.

When I was at Teradata, I got called a growth guy. And then when I became C.E.O. of the whole company, I got called a cost-cutter. Then, I came to H.P. and became an operations guy.

My objective with strategy is to be very repetitive, to be somewhat boring, to allow people to coalesce behind a common direction.

You have got to get the strategy right; you have to get the operations right - lined up from R&D out to the field.

Our job is to execute.

I go all over the place. I do like the ability to go around the company at different levels to find the people that have the actual answers to the question.