I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing happening with more and more CEOs stepping up, saying, ‘I have to fight carbon emissions.’
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.
I mentor a lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs, and when I see that product is the number-one thing, the only thing that matters, that’s a real red flag.
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.
Limos are fine for prime ministers or presidents who need the security, but there’s no need for CEOs or executives to have one as a status symbol.
Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. 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.
We all aren’t in government, we all aren’t CEOs, but we all are somebody.
Trade is the key to the economic outlook in Britain and the E.U. Many corporate chieftains joined large bank CEOs and the fearmongering IMF to suggest that the E.U. will deal harshly with Britain if it leaves and stop all trade. That’s mutually assured destruction – MAD.
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.
I was with top CEOs in 2009, and they were clearly shaken. Top leaders of Wall Street and elsewhere, shaken. The ones at the top did get by because if they are seeing a decline somewhere, there is also growth elsewhere, like in emerging economies.
CEOs must embrace the role of serving as the public face of the company to their customer community and the marketplace at large.
My feminist values are rooted in my socialist values. The number of women CEOs in Britain’s biggest companies is irrelevant if they pay their women workers poverty wages or discriminate against black employees.
CEOs are also chief capital allocators. This is a point Warren Buffett has repeatedly made: that the role management plays in allocating capital across businesses and boosting returns on that capital is a critical yet poorly recognized one.
I think of a traditional CEO as being divorced from customers. A lot of consumer company CEOs – they’re not really interacting with consumers.
‘The Week’ is my favourite magazine. Everyone from presidents to CEOs of companies love it, politicians, people in the massive charity business in America, in the arts and even more especially in the media.
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.
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.
I have met with hundreds of young fashion designers, hundreds of fashion startups, hundreds of CEOs and business leaders. All I do is get to ask questions of professionals in the industry. I learn from every conversation. It is the best education I could have.
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.
As chairman, I commit to keeping Business Roundtable CEOs at the forefront of constructive public policy debates as we pursue an agenda of greater growth and opportunity for all Americans.
When my co-founder and I first had the idea for IronPort, an email security company, we triangulated a list of the 20 most relevant people in email – former CEOs, open source technologists, investors and thought leaders.
I think most CEOs think their stock is undervalued, probably.
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.
I’ve always been of the view that two-term presidency rule is a pretty good one and CEOs shouldn’t overstay their welcome.
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.
If I get asked to talk to a group of CEOs or a group of high school students, I pick high school students.
It’s pretty rare to have CEOs or high level executives at big companies who are social activists. They tend not to be drawn to those areas of life.
Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn’t to say there aren’t entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there’d be no reason for the old. Our life span reflects our particular life strategy.
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