Quotes About Ceos

#1. 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.

Louis V. Gerstner Jr.

#2. The church is not a campus but a community. Pastors are not CEOs; they are shepherds.

Dillon Burroughs

#3. 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.'

Hans Rosling

#4. 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.

Edmund White

#5. Everyone is groping and grasping," he says. "People are turning to Buddhism, Christianity, self-help, and Taoism. CEOs and billionaires run around with their spiritual masters and visit meditation rooms.

Anonymous

#6. 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.

Edmund Phelps

#7. In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.

Ben Horowitz

#8. 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.

Kenneth C. Griffin

#9. 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.

Noreena Hertz

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

Magic Johnson

#11. Greed has increasingly become a virtue among Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs in the U.S. Nowhere else in the world do CEOs insist on receiving compensation as high compared to what their employees earn.

Simon Mainwaring

#12. Other CEOs were shown fly-fishing in Scottish rivers or piloting their own Learjets into Helsinki. Mr. Hosokawa was photographed at home in the leather chair he sat in when he listened, a Nansei EX-12 stereo system behind him.

Ann Patchett

#13. I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.

Jordan Ellenberg

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

James Daly

#15. We got CEOs making 200 times the worker's pay, but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage.

Iris Dement

#16. 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.

Anupam Kher

#17. CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

James Hansen

#18. I was also encountering CEOs who felt that their grip on social media was under control because they had an intern managing a Twitter feed. And I disagreed.

Jennifer Janson

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

Ginni Rometty

#20. 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.

Rachel Caine

#21. It was another example of a phenomenon I call "the talking dog syndrome." Some people are still amazed that any woman (this includes Governors' wives, corporate CEOs, sports stars and rock singers) can hold her own under pressure and be articulate and knowledgeable. The dog can talk!

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#22. thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

Jason Jennings

#23. You don't characterize CEOs as dealmakers or in any one particular area. An important characteristic of a CEO is leader. That's probably the most important characteristic.

Michael Ramsey

#24. 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.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

#25. Society is still adapting to women being CEOs and professionals rather than homemakers. Because of this, the unfortunate outcome is that we feel we have to be successful at both - in the office and in the home. Striking that balance is different for everyone.

Brit Morin

#26. We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

Bill McKibben

#27. Companies who have been able to groom CEOs internally have done significantly better. We came to the conclusion that the quality of several of the reviewed internal candidates was so high that it did not merit to go outside.

Jorma Ollila

#28. 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.

Ben Horowitz

#29. Too many companies are just being big for the sheer sake of it. Too many CEOs thinking bigger is better.

Roger Altman

#30. 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.

Joe Grant

#31. 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.

Jared Diamond

#32. 'Job Killer.' Those are the two words you are most likely to hear uttered by most American CEOs when confronted with proposals to enact family-friendly work policies.

Madeleine M. Kunin

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

Michael J. Saylor

#34. In his first speech as Speaker, Boehner thanked his loved ones - tobacco lobbyists, the oil companies, the CEOs.

Jay Leno

#35. The deck is still stacked in favor of those already at the top. And there's something wrong with that. There's something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker.

Hillary Clinton

#36. 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.

Gene Simmons

#37. 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.

Jeffrey R. Immelt

#38. 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.

John Sununu

#39. 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.

Hal Sparks

#40. 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.

Frank Luntz

#41. Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with going from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often.

James C. Collins

#42. At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs - as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

Lawrence M. Krauss

#43. I met with several public company CEOs to learn about their experiences of going public and listened to as many earnings calls as I possibly could.

Jon Oringer

#44. If CEOs insist that middle class Americans compete with cheap foreign labor, why not outsource the jobs of CEOs? If business is all about cost, they should be the first to volunteer.

Lou Dobbs

#45. Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed?

Madeleine M. Kunin

#46. I talk to hundreds of companies a year and spend hour after hour in heady pow-wows with CEOs, financial analysts and my colleagues in the mutual-fund business, but I stumble onto the big winners in extracurricular situations, the same way you do.

Peter Lynch

#47. CEOs are paid for doing a terrible job. If the system wasn't so messed up, guys like me wouldn't make this kind of money.

Carl Icahn

#48. 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.

Robert Crumb

#49. 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.

Frank Luntz

#50. From this irritating reality comes The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won't do; it's mindboggling screw-ups that are required.

Warren Buffett

#51. There's something to be said for CEOs' entering politics: In theory, they have management expertise and financial savvy. Then again, it didn't work so well with Dick Cheney.

Nicholas Kristof

#52. CEOs must embrace the role of serving as the public face of the company to their customer community and the marketplace at large.

Simon Mainwaring

#53. We all love people who give credit to others for their success. Companies would probably do better with CEOs who didn't blow their own horn and ask for ridiculous salaries and new yachts every year.

Adora Svitak

#54. Without question, CEOs, executives and employees in companies in the United States and around the world have rallied to face the challenge of a social media marketplace.

Simon Mainwaring

#55. When a chief executive says, 'people are our most important asset' he (almost always 'he' since by 2008, only 12 of the Fortune 500 companies had CEOs who were women)is really speaking of a small percentage of the firm's employees. Everyone else is merely labor cost.

John J. Sarno

#56. 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.

Morley Safer

#57. From this perspective, we were all divine Shakespeares, creating and playing the roles of muscled heroes and conniving villains, pious saints and debauched sinners, corrupt CEOs and disinterested temp workers.

Jonathan Talat Phillips

#58. Prosperity can't be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers. Democracy can't be just for billionaires and corporations. Prosperity and democracy are part of your basic bargain, too.

Hillary Clinton

#59. CEOs of large firms often fail to read the handwriting on the wall, because of complacence, inertia, or overconfidence.

Navi Radjou

#60. CEOs having psychopathic tendencies and how their lack of empathy helped them in a corporate setting.

E.H. Reinhard

#61. There are major CEOs who do not know how to hold a knife and fork properly, but I don't worry about that as much as the lack of kindness.

Letitia Baldrige

#62. 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.

Andrew Mason

#63. By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

James Surowiecki

#64. CEOs are worried they're going to get fired any minute. They're worried about their portfolios.

Dan Jenkins

#65. I seek out a lot of advice from other CEOs.

Mark Pincus

#66. CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.

Marcus Buckingham

#67. When an organization starts hemorrhaging talent, CEOs and boards of directors want to know why. If the boss gets blamed for the brain drain and is ultimately removed, it means relief for the employees still there and ex post facto vengeance for the former ones.

Jeffrey Kluger

#68. In my new business, this is one of the things we work actively with CEOs to see: how one idea from the top can spiral into 100 projects for the team and overwhelm them in ways the CEOs can't even imagine. But

Jonathan Raymond

#69. 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.

Dan Maffei

#70. 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.

Jack Welch

#71. It's interesting that there's so many different sides of this: Women get frustrated that we don't get paid enough; and then the Republicans or the CEOs that are men say, "Well, it's because women take off time for maternity leave."

Jennifer Lawrence

#72. It doesn't make much sense and it's nil premium. They're going to have co-CEOs ... which is a very uncomfortable structure.

Martin Sorrell

#73. Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance.

Brad Stone

#74. I think the greatest CEOs in the United States, business, anyway, are the ones you don't hear too much about.

Edward Zander

#75. 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.

Lewis B. Smedes

#76. CEOs are hired for their intellect and business expertise - and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence.

Daniel Goleman

#77. I think from a moral issue, CEOs should not be making - whether it's 270 or 300 times more than their workers are making.

Hillary Clinton

#78. 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.

Bill Maris

#79. Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I've worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.

Peter Drucker

#80. 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.

Scott Weiss

#81. 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.

James Green Somerville

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

Andrea Jung

#83. 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.

Rick Pitino

#84. I never imagined working with CEOs, congressmen or the military, yet I make regular visits to the Pentagon, stop by the Capitol now and then and sit down with leaders of all kinds of companies.

Simon Sinek

#85. Briefcases, like CEOs, should never look new and unused.

Lois Wyse

#86. I've read that many major CEOs and assorted other captains of industry are sociopaths," she replied, almost conversationally. "I imagine you fit right in.

Caitlin Crews

#87. When I look at founders and CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, these are companies that are creating extraordinary social good and extraordinary economic and educational empowerment, all within with context of a for-profit model.

Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

#88. 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.

Jack Canfield

#89. ... CEOs are the ghost writers of the political discourse ...

Paulo Da Costa

#90. CEOs should be measured by the value they create into the community, the shareholders and the members of the company.

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

#91. 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.

Shawne Merriman

#92. Take Obama's challenge, in January 2010, to the assembled CEOs at the Forum on Modernizing Government: "If you can book dinner on OpenTable, or a flight on Southwest or United online, then why shouldn't you be able to make an appointment at your local Social Security office the same way?

Aneesh Chopra

#93. CEOs of top companies could probably use a dose of not-asking-for-raise behavior and less self-entitlement, rather than us trying to change girls in order to fit into the common mold of what we think a CEO looks like.

Adora Svitak

#94. [T]here's a difference between confident leadership and empty-headed delusion or cheerleading. And this is a difference that many CEOs miss.

Henry Blodget

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

Marc Andreessen

#96. Everything ultimately becomes the CEO's problem, no matter where it starts. I can see why some CEOs crack under the pressure.

Yishan Wong

#97. 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.

Steve Inskeep

#98. 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.

Danica Patrick

#99. 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.

William Clay Ford Jr.

#100. Sometimes it takes a lowly, title-less man to humble the world. Kings, rulers, CEOs, judges, doctors, pastors, they are already expected to be greater and wiser.

Criss Jami