Top 77 CEOs Quotes

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

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.

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.

After formulating and communicating the right strategy and optimizing operations to execute that strategy, CEOs and other top leaders then must be able to build management teams that truly understand the big picture.

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.

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.

When I started to go out there and listen to different startups or different CEOs talk about how you build this company from a two-person team to a team of 500, I really just stepped back and was like, ‘Well, it’s not necessarily a business, but football has a lot of similarities to that.’

Most of the tech CEOs I know used to think that moving to the Midwest or the South was beneath us, a good tactic for the Boeings of the world who don’t need the kind of rare skills we depend on, who have to grub for profits when we reach for growth. But if Amazon can’t afford to keep growing in Seattle, who can?

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.

I’ve talked to several CEOs – from a recycling company in Indiana, a furniture company in Kentucky, a brewing company in Colorado, and more – who believe paying higher wages is both the right thing to do and part of a successful business model.

If I get asked to talk to a group of CEOs or a group of high school students, I pick high school students.

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.

When I dine with CEOs at Michael’s in New York or Spago in L.A., we score the best tables. On my own, I wind up seated near the kitchen doors.

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.

In my line of work, I frequently communicate with CEOs and their executive assistants, and nowhere is the need for gratitude more clear.

I do consider myself a postfeminist. I just want women to have choices – they can be CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, or they can be stay-at-home mothers and raise their kids as a job.

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

I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing happening with more and more CEOs stepping up, saying, ‘I have to fight carbon emissions.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I co-founded Affectiva with Professor Rosalind W. Picard when we spun out of MIT Media Lab in 2009. I acted as Chief Technology and Science Officer for several years until becoming CEO mid-2016, one of a handful of female CEOs in the AI space.

I know CEOs, and they get sick when they have to lay people off, especially around Christmas.

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.

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.

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

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.

Diversity, I think, has become a real business imperative at the very top with CEOs who are facing massive disruption.

The Fed has got to become a more democratic institution that is responsive to the needs of the middle class, not just Wall Street CEOs.

I think of a traditional CEO as being divorced from customers. A lot of consumer company CEOs – they’re not really interacting with consumers.

Ride It’ did it for me. Not only did the Asian community love it, but the black community and the white community got to hear about it. The song became such a big hit for me and got me noticed by the CEOs of Cash Money in America.

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.’

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.

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.

Since retiring from the FBI in 2007, I’ve traveled the world and worked with everyone from CEOs to their managers and everyday workers on how to apply techniques from hundreds of high-stakes, life-or-death negotiations to business negotiations.

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.

CEOs resign when the internal dynamics of the company and the external dynamics of the company actually come together to say it is appropriate. When the internal dynamics ask you whether you have a replacement. I think the transition from CEOships have also become cartoonish.

I know a lot of CEOs who are looking for three- to four-year varsity athletes – not necessarily because these people are going to be doing pushups or spiking volleyballs in the workplace, but because they’re looking for that continuity, that person who was gritty about something.

Digital disruption has blurred industry lines. You have industry convergence. You have cross-industry platforms. And you have CEOs who are benchmarking the best, regardless of industry.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution demands that CEOs take responsibility for the massive transformation of their businesses and for the extraordinary impact that this transformation will have on wider society.

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.

CEOs are called by their first names by young whippersnappers. That makes everybody uncomfortable. We need order and structure back in the workplace.

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

‘Founder’ is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.

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.

At the end of the day, both men and women who become CEOs have showed tenacity and hard work to succeed in their careers. It takes not just skills but also extreme dedication and commitment. And regardless of gender, CEOs are measured by the same criteria – the growth and success of the business.

The days of CEOs getting rich while shareholders lose has got to end. Management must be accountable.

There are American directors I’d really like to work with, but I don’t know how much I want to be sitting in my house, doing the rounds of meetings with CEOs. You have to be really hardworking to do all that, and I’m lazy.

As CEOs or board members, women are still underrepresented, and that gap is actually growing.

More often than not, CEOs are conflict-avoidant because their role is to define vision and strategy than it is to get into confrontations with negative and toxic people which they can’t stand.

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.

For far too long, Congress has been focused on the CEOs, the millionaires, the billionaires.

The thing that’s confusing for investors is that founders don’t know how to be CEO. I didn’t know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don’t know how to be CEOs, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn. The question is… can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?

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.

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

I think that’s the responsibility of the CEO and the CEOs below me: to make sure that we’re constantly putting people in places where they have the opportunity to develop into those careers but also having a rewards and recognition system that allows a great programmer to stay as a great programmer.

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.

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.

A company logo may be the last thing cost-conscious CEOs focus on when they’re looking to jump-start growth. Which is perhaps why it took more than two decades for White Mountain Footwear, a privately held shoe manufacturer based in Lisbon, N.H., to finally give its own emblem some serious thought.

Indian-Americans are physicians, engineers, CEOs, professors, teachers, entrepreneurs. They are a vital part of the United States’ economic and social fabric. Because of this long history, the bonds among our people and our cultures will remain strong.

A subset of CEOs is that of entrepreneurs. And the classical definition of an entrepreneur is an individual who pursues opportunity without regard to the resources currently controlled. That sounds like a very different person than one might expect an analytical investment manager to be.

I’m not like most artists or most CEOs – I’m a CEO first, then an artist.

The real danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like action is happening when in fact nothing is being done.

I seek out a lot of advice from other CEOs.

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.

We must do better for our people by implementing a robust jobs agenda that prioritizes workers – not out-of-state corporations and CEOs.

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.

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.

Visionary CEOs are product- and business-model-centric and extremely customer focused.

Now, metaphorically, I sit at any table that I want. I can sit with the jocks, I can sit with the gang members, I can sit with the politicians, I can sit with the CEOs. My brand can fit anywhere.

CEOs of large corporations earn 400 times what their workers make. That is not what America is supposed to be about.

Many CEOs and leaders think that silence is indeed golden, that consensus is bliss. It is – sometimes. But more often what it signifies is that there are no respected processes for surfacing concerns and dissent.