Quotes About CEO

The myth that the CEO is going to discover you and nurture you and ask you to join her for lunch is just that, a Hollywood myth.

Almost nothing can make you more miserable than when your company is struggling, and only then do you realize that this is exactly when it's almost impossible for a CEO to quit.

Every time I meet with the CEO of a big laptop company, they tell me they 'studied' my design.

My focus - even before becoming CEO - has always been memorable and unique content. And one of the most important things we did to reinforce that was create A+E Studios.

I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.

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

For a hot-shot CEO taking over a troubled company, mass firings are the ultimate quick fix, the accounting equivalent of crack: cheap, easy to score, instantly gratifying, and highly addictive.

I picked up business skills along the way, but there are things you learn at school like speaking the language of business so you can speak with CEOs.

In a company where tech decisions were still ultracentralized, the repercussions of a distracted CEO had to be damaging.

If every company becomes a technology company, business models and transitions are going to occur. From a CEO's perspective, this is going to be the biggest technology transition of all times.

And as in any line of business, a succeeding CEO who couldn't make a bygone cock-up look like an opportunity missed wasn't fit for management, and should take her retirement package, her annual bonus, her golden handshake and her non-disclosure kickback and tiptoe from the boardroom in disgrace.

I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

The facts are the vice president's company that he was CEO of, that did business with sworn enemies of the United States, paid millions of dollars in fines for providing false financial information, it's under investigation for bribing foreign officials.

If you prosecute a CEO or other senior executive and send him or her to jail for committing a crime, the deterrent effect in my view vastly outweighs even the best compliance program you can put in place.

Orange County, featured none but Mediterranean architecture; indeed, the Mediterranean style prevailed to such an extent that it sometimes seemed restfully consistent but at other times was boring, suffocating, as if the chief executive officer of Taco Bell had somehow become an all-powerful dictator and had decreed that everyone must live not in houses but in Mexican restaurants.

The one thing I have learned as a CEO is that leadership at various levels is vastly different. When I was leading a function or a business, there were certain demands and requirements to be a leader. As you move up the organization, the requirements for leading that organization don't grow vertically they grow exponentially.

What if one out of every three multinational corporation CEO's were raped every year? Don't you think that would raise a kind of ruckus?

The CEO's greatest influence on the company isn't her contributions to the product, the strategy, or even getting the company funded. The CEO's greatest contribution to the company is the wizardry required to hire a team that is going to be amazingly effective at executing the company's strategy. Great CEOs hire teams that are far better than they have any right to expect. Put succinctly, a core competency for a CEO is to "date up." This

Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.

I was surprised by the attention and visibility on me as a black woman CEO. I look forward to the day when this is the norm and not the exception.

As CEO of Aetna, I was a buyer of portfolio companies rather than a participant in the value creation process. From the end of the assembly line, what happened in manufacturing wasn't visible to me.

Talent is the No. 1 priority for a CEO. You think it's about vision and strategy, but you have to get the right people first.

I think that the CEO is responsible for setting the vision, for articulating the mission, and for building a team of powerful evangelists that share that mission and that passion, because no one person can do anything by themselves.

If someone was having some surgery that was going to put them out for three months, it's something you should consider, with a man or a woman. What is the impact of having the C.E.O. or visionary out for three months?