Top 292 CEO Quotes

Believing in the good of humanity is a revolutionary act – it means that we don’t need all those managers and CEO’s, kings and generals. That we can trust people to govern themselves and make their own decisions.

A critical question to ask when bringing in a new CEO to take the reins of a company you started is: Do you want someone who will maintain company culture or reinvent it?

I’m so glad I didn’t become a doctor, because I do more than any doctor can do. I am an administrator, a CEO, doctor, psychiatrist, an activist, a campaign funder. I think I did well.

If you have a line of business – I know this as a CEO – or if you have a teenager – I know this as a parent – who have a spending problem, what do you do? You quit giving them money.

As CEO, I believe my most important job is to both define reality and inspire hope for the PayPal team. Defining reality includes being realistic about all the things that could go wrong so that we are prepared to navigate those challenges.

When you’re young and you have money, you become the CEO, automatically, of life, of your family.

If a CEO takes an interest in you and he happens to be an Asian man, then that’s great, but as an African-American woman, you want to make sure that if the executive vice-president of the company is an African-American woman that you get to know her.

When you’re in a band, it’s like everyone’s the CEO, and anyone could destroy it at any moment.

I think about culture and values as curbs on a highway. When the curbs are high enough, a vehicle can veer to the left or right, but the curbs keep the car on the road. It is the CEO’s job to build those curbs as high as possible.

Everyone in the United States asks me about being a woman CEO. To be honest, it has had no impact on my career. While I was at BCG, it didn’t matter whether you were a man or a woman. The only thing that mattered was that you were good at your job.

The question was, in a sense, at Princeton Review, how much value was I adding as a public company CEO. I was adding less than other people might’ve… I think you want to move on when you’ve given your best work and then feel that you’re not going to add as much value moving forward.

Whatever you do, it’s important you do it with passion. Whether you’re a CEO, a fighter or a bus boy.

Because one of the main jobs of a CEO is to set the vision and strategy for the company, I’m a big believer in making one of the founders the default CEO.

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

I picked up the phone and called Herbert Hainer, the CEO of Adidas, and said, ‘Well, it’s Peace Day coming up. I think it’s about time after 60 years to end this feud. How about doing something together?’

I think if there’s any difference between me and a traditional CEO, it’s that I’ve been unwilling to change myself or shape my personality around what’s expected.

When I was still settling into being a CEO, I wasted a lot of time driving initiatives designed to please others, acting as if someone wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do with Redfin.

The United States is like a big company, and we need a CEO to run it.

Feminism is being able to have the choice – the choice to be a CEO, to be an executive, to be a journalist, to be a congresswoman, to be a mother, a stay-at-home mother, to be a wife.

Nowadays you don’t need to be a senator or a CEO or a celebrity to have a voice in the media, and if you happen to be a senator, a CEO or a celebrity, you have a thousand people each with their own respective audiences to hold you accountable.

When the CEO makes a decision, people don’t come back on it.

When you take away all the people whose shoulders a CEO stands on, the CEO is just a person.

Being a CEO requires a specific skill set, and a background in engineering equips individuals with the ability to plan logically and make decisions that fit properly within the context of the business.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions – and resolutions to ‘get in better shape’ in general, which are very amorphous – is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO – you’ll quit.

Every time a twenty-something CEO turns down a multibillion-dollar offer for a company that has little or no revenues, it hits a raw nerve in me. Unlike most professionals, I am not shocked by the seemingly bizarre behavior of those founders who pursue their vision beyond all rational thought or monetary reward.

As a CEO, I want to show women that there are no limits to what they can achieve, whether through entrepreneurship, government, science or any path they choose, and there is plenty of room for women at the top.

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.

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

I worked with the best – Givenchy, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent – and it gave me an ability to be confident. It turned me into a CEO and a creative director and a brand.

Social lets consumers talk about the products. You may pay your way onto the Facebook feed, but after that, it’s conversations by the users. That’s not sufficient because it leaves out what is possible for employees to talk, for R&D to talk, or the CEO to talk.

I think they, Peter McCullough was, turns out was not a good CEO.

My dad is into business and quite established. But I decided to pursue acting. Had I joined him I would’ve become the CEO of the company and things would’ve been easier for me.

Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.

If you look at any normal organization, the CEO is the person with the highest E.Q. The person with the highest IQ is often in the back room running the financials or the operations. That’s topsy turvy.

Clearly, every company needs a leader. That’s an important part of being the CEO of the company.

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.

As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they’re in the kitchen cooking. So it’s understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.

We ought to start running the government like a private-sector business. I have that ability as CEO of our companies. I have line item vetoes, and if I didn’t, we’d probably be out of business by now.

To build a great company, which is a CEO’s job, sometimes you have to stand up against conventional wisdom.

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

One of the things that I think I do well as a CEO is that I’m present. When I’m with my employees, I’m there in the moment.

People ask my mother whether she had any idea that I’d be CEO of a company some day, and she would say, ‘Absolutely not. Totally out of the realm of possibility.’ There was certainly nothing that would have been very predictable in my upbringing.

Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, sees technology as an augmentation to current healing tools – but not a replacement for human kindness, an integral part of healthcare.

I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more than that. That’s always been my competitive advantage.

Culture is what happens when the CEO isn’t in the room.

Most chief executives rise to that position by being good operating managers. Few have extensive experience or training with capital allocation. What CEO wants to return excess cash to shareholders when it could be used to expand his or her empire?

A lot of people thought Steve Jobs was a CEO of Apple but he never was until he came back to Apple in 1997.

You’re doing a major merger, you got to hope you didn’t get it wrong. That’s the view of any CEO.

Raise your ambition beyond where you’re capable of now. There’s nothing about my hometown that said I’d be working with Fortune 50 CEO’s, Olympians, at the highest level.

Fortunately, right now ‘entrepreneurship’ is one of the business world’s biggest buzz words and so many young people in our country are looking up to this new generation of CEO’s as their modern day rock stars. Whenever you have that effect, it makes the job of promoting entrepreneurship much easier.

My title is LaVar Ball, the big baller, the CEO of the Big Baller Brand.