Chief Executive Quotes & Sayings

William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in April of 1841, after only one month in office, was the first Chief Executive to hide his physical frailties. — Robert Dallek

Abby Johnson has agreed to become Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity, reflecting a further step forward in our leadership succession plan. Abby will retain her role of President, and I will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board. — Edward Johnson, III

My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand. — Henry Mintzberg

Ethics must begin at the top of an organization. It is a leadership issue and the chief executive must set the example. — Edward F. Hennessey

I'm Chief Executive Officer at Art of the Olympians Museum in Fort Myers, Florida, which was founded by my Mexico City teammate Al Oerter and his wife Cathy in 2005. It shows that Olympians can have another life; we have got art from more than 100 Olympians. — Bob Beamon

the ideal chief executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action. — Walter Isaacson

I don't want to be a great chief executive without being a great mum and a great wife. — Angela Ahrendts

I shall make it my chief business to see that the [royal] executive power has its place in the constitution. — Honore Gabriel Riqueti, Comte De Mirabeau

I received a phone call from the chief executive of my principal sponsor [Marlboro], who actually told me that it would be in the interests of the sport if I started to lose races. Which, I mean, just blew my mind. — Ron Dennis

Whether a chief executive officer (CEO) is applying the practices to build an organizational vision or an employee is helping a colleague resolve a problem, anyone at any organizational level can leverage leadership practices. — Gary DePaul

The right response when, in the army, you are given an unlawful order, is to refuse that order. The right response of a chief executive in this state and in this nation, when faced with an order by a court that he conscientiously believes violates the constitution he is sworn to respect, is to refuse their order! — Alan Keyes

The unions need to be taken on. British Airways is massively over-staffed and has got to get its costs down ... The problem for [chief executive] Willie Walsh is that the board of BA has no spine, no balls and no vision. — Michael O'Leary

The hardest thing for a chief executive to do is to tell someone that they don't have a job anymore. — Carly Fiorina

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

We must expose to the light of public inquiry those forces which would destroy our country and our way of life. We should pay no attention to the recommendations of men who call the Constitution an eighteenth-century agrarian document-who apologize for capitalism and free enterprise. We should refuse to follow their siren song of increasingly concentrating the powers of government in the chief executive, of delegating American sovereign authority to non-American institutions of the United Nations and pretending that it will bring peace to the world by turning our armed forces over to a United Nations worldwide police force. (Title of Liberty, p. 16.) — Ezra Taft Benson

Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive. — John D. Rockefeller

I was the chief executive once, I've been there. My recommendation to anybody is don't go backwards. — Stuart Rose

Goldman Sachs was fundamentally responsible for the crash of 2008, but by that time its former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Henry 'Hank' Paulson, had been installed as US Treasury Secretary to begin the bank bail out policy, with enormous benefit to Goldman Sachs, in the closing weeks of the Bush administration. Goldman Sachs was also instrumental in the collapse of the economy in Greece that started the 'euro panic' that later engulfed Ireland. — David Icke

The governor is Virginia's chief executive and represents the commonwealth at all times. — Bob McDonnell

chief executive of Google, reckoned in 2010 that about five exabytes of data, or the equivalent of 250,000 years of DVD-quality video, was created in the world every two days. By some estimates, in 2013 we will create that much data every 10 minutes. — Portfolio Penguin

A president who believed that America's greatness is recoverable and expandable - a chief executive determined to lead us back to national restoration - would reject the crippling notions of national impotency that Obama has embraced. — David Limbaugh

There is no constitutional or legal requirement that the President shall take the oath of office in the presence of the People but there is so manifest an appropriateness in the public induction to office of the chief executive officer of the nation that from the beginning of the Government the people to whose service the official oath consecrates the officer, have been called to witness the solemn ceremonial — Benjamin Harrison

Senior management approval and buy-in is essential to the success of the overall BCP effort. If possible, you should attempt to have the plan endorsed by the top executive in your business - the chief executive officer, chairman, president, or similar business leader. This move demonstrates the importance of the plan to the entire organization and showcases the business leader's commitment to business continuity. The signature of such an individual on the plan also gives it much greater weight and credibility in the eyes of other senior managers, who might otherwise brush it off as a necessary but trivial IT initiative. — James Michael Stewart

I was the editor of the 'News of the World;' I was the editor of the 'Sun' and chief executive. — Rebekah Brooks

I was 25 when I was made director of marketing at 'Newsweek.' I was 29 when I was made chief executive officer of Kaplan Educational Centers. I was raised to be confident. — Jonathan Grayer

The reality is even if you are a hands-on Mayor or Governor or chief executive, at best, you must know about 10 or 20% of what's going on. Otherwise, you never get through the day ... I was very hands on, and there's lots of stuff I didn't know, and lots of things that either went wrong or right that I would find out about afterwards. — Rudy Giuliani

To wage war, we need a commander in chief who has made tough calls in tough times and stood up to be held accountable over and over, not first-term senators who've never made an executive decision in their life. — Carly Fiorina

Some scholars argue that although the brain might contain neural subsystems, or modules, specialized for tasks like recognizing faces and understanding language, it also contains a part that constitutes a person, a self: the chief executive of all the subsystems. — Paul Bloom

We have to separate here the church in its broad sense. We have Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox churches. The Catholic church is a corporation like a chief executive. A fairly homogenous operation. Today its attitude toward anti-Semitism is much more severe than it's ever been. The Catholic Church today is much less the problem than the other groups. — Manfred Gerstenfeld

Whatever the political affiliation of our next President, whatever his views may be on all the issues and problems that rush in upon us, he must above all be the chief executive in every sense of the word. — John F. Kennedy

I cannot imagine any other country in the world where the opposition would seek, and the chief executive would allow, the dissemination of his most private and personal conversations with his staff, which, to be honest, do not exactly confer sainthood on anyone concerned. — Gerald R. Ford

Executive power is exercised by the President of the Governing Board who, with the title of President of the Republic of Chile, administers the state and is the Supreme Chief of the Nation. — Augusto Pinochet

I accept that responsibility and ask only that I be judged by my performance as its chief executive. — Jane Byrne

I doubt very much if a man whose main literary interests were in works by Mr. Zane Grey, admirable as they may be, is particularly equipped to be the chief executive of this country, particularly where Indian Affairs are concerned. — Dean Acheson

A lot of what I do is running businesses rather than buying stocks. My worst decision is probably when I know I have the wrong chief executive running the business, and I keep on waiting to make the difficult decision of replacing him. — Gerry Schwartz

A tremendous chief executive in a small market will never be great. All great companies start with great markets. — Douglas Leone

You hire a chief executive, pay him, and hold him accountable after a year or two. The time for so-called honorary jobs is over. What Pakistan squash needs is results, and that can only be achieved by professionals. — Jahangir Khan

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I have been tested in many ways, personally, I have beaten breast cancer, I buried a child to addiction. Professionally, you cannot go from being a secretary of nine-person real estate firm to the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world without having been tested over and over and over. — Carly Fiorina

I've made no secret that although I loved being a legislator, I particularly loved being a chief executive. — Antonio Villaraigosa

It is extraordinary that each of the three individuals this president [ George W. Bush] has nominated for the Supreme Court - Chief Justice [John] Roberts, Harriet Miers and now Judge Alito - has served not only as a lawyer for the executive branch, but has defended the most expansive view of presidential authority. — Edward Kennedy

The chief ability of an executive should be his ability to recognize ability. — Evan Esar

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term. — J. Irwin Miller

It is well to remember that the office of Chief Executive is in part a symbol of the nation and that leaders in a nation may differ in their own house but they have instant solidarity in the presence of foreign attack — Herbert Hoover

When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options. — George Akerlof

A sister is the cure for swollen heads and ego trips. One may a star, a Chief Executive-famous and rich and beautiful. But one's sister has the family photo album. And a long, long memory. And a tendency to wink at one on Top Occasions. — Pam Brown

To have a healthy and thriving business, there must be healthy relationships with the C.E.O.S. in the organization and I'm not referring to the Chief Executive Offficers. I am talking about the Customers, the Employees, the Owner (or stockholders), and the Suppliers. — James Hunter

Of one thing the investor can be certain: A large company's need to bring in a new chief executive from the outside is a damning sign of something basically wrong with the existing management - no matter how good the surface signs may have been as indicated by the most recent earnings statement. — Philip Arthur Fisher

The Constitution charges the president to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"; Obamaland contends that it is simply engaging in executive discretion. But Judge Hanen countered, "Exercising prosecutorial discretion and/or refusing to enforce a statute does not also entail bestowing benefits" - such as Social Security cards, work permits, and the ability to travel. In supporting the president's imperious go-it-alone approach, Democratic leaders have acquiesced to what Turley calls "their own institutional obsolescence." They've handed a tool of mischief to the next chief executive. — Anonymous

A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning. - Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company, April 1997 — Tom Standage

He was a great president in his first term; in his second term, he wasn't the same Grover Cleveland he was to begin with ... Cleveland reestablished the presidency by being not only a chief executive but a leader. — Harry S. Truman

A CEO is known by the company he reaps. — Brian Spellman

An executive cannot gradually dismiss details. Business is made up of details and I notice that the chief executive who dismisses them is quite likely to dismiss his business. Success is the sum of detail. It might perhaps be pleasing to imagine oneself beyond detail and engaged only in great things, but as I have often observed, if one attends only to great things and lets the little things pass the great things become little; that is, the business shrinks. — Harvey S. Firestone

Life is very good. I'm the president and Chief Executive Officer of the Wireless trade association, the CTIA. — Steve Largent

Last year, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell conducted a survey of chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies for his book Blink. He discovered that while in the US population 14.5 per cent of all men are 6ft (1.83m) or taller, among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies the proportion is 58 per cent. And while 3.9 per cent of American adults are 6ft 2in or taller, almost a third of the CEOs were that tall. — Daniel Finkelstein

Her father was one of those tall, angular, self-embalming types. All balls and liver. His kind predated the notion of alcoholism. Groton, Princeton, Harvard Business School. His neatly clipped silver hair and tailored suits and unmitigating stare of eyes and trim old body said it all over in a simple, clear language: Chief Executive Officer. Do not fuck with this man. — Chang-rae Lee

And obviously, with hindsight now, now knowing what went on in the company, it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company, most senior person in the United Kingdom, come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that, and frankly that's a failure of Parliament. — Tom A. Watson

It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without any previous political training. — Ulysses S. Grant

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey. — Terry Eagleton

These niggaz ain't thugs, the real thugs is the government.
Don't matter if you Independent, Democrat or Republican,
Niggaz politickin' the street, get into beef,
Start blastin' ... now a new cat is executive chief. — Talib Kweli

The chief executive officer is also the chief sales officer. He or she is responsible for the success of the company and making a profit. The closer the CEO is to the everyday selling process, bringing in business, the more successful the company will become. — Jeffrey Gitomer

When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person. — Richard Dawkins

Gunpei Yokoi, asked his boss, 'What should I make?' Nintendo chief executive Hiroshi Yamauchi replied, 'Something great.'
Game Over Nintendo's Battle to Dominate Videogames — David Sheff

Show me a chief executive who's on five boards and who lends his or her name, prestige and time to 15 community activities - and I'll show you a company that's underperforming. A chief executive is paid to run the company. That's the CEO's job. — Albert J. Dunlap

The reason is still difficult to explain, but it is not complicated. That inner voice that will not be denied, once we learn to listen to it, had whispered since the beginning, "Business is not what your life is about. Founding VISA and being its chief executive officer is something you must do, but it's only preparatory." — Dee Hock

Pro football was taking off when I became commissioner, and when a sport's successful and you're its chief executive officer, much of the credit flows to you and you develop a good track record. — Pete Rozelle

The politicians looked after the mandarins. The mandarins looked after the central bankers and the regulators. (The governor of the Central Bank was paid more in 2008 than the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, as was the chief executive of the Financial Regulator.) The Central Bankers looked after the bankers. The bankers looked after IBEC. And IBEC looked after the government. The circle of oligarchs was watertight. — Shane Ross

Apple chief executive Tim Cook is such a respected figure that it's easy to overlook the basic problem with his argument about encryption: Cook is asserting that a private company and the interests of its customers should prevail over the public's interest as expressed by our courts. — David Ignatius

Any chief executive who hires a consultant to give them strategy should be fired. — Duff McDonald

That the Bomb altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots. It redefined the presidency, as in all respects America's "Commander in Chief" (a term that took on a new and unconstitutional meaning in this period). It fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized. It redefined the government as a National Security State, with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control. It redefined Congress, as an executor of the executive. And it redefined the Supreme Court, as a follower of the follower of the executive. Only one part of the government had the supreme power, the Bomb, and all else must defer to it, for the good of the nation, for the good of the world, for the custody of the future, in a world of perpetual emergency superseding ordinary constitutional restrictions. — Garry Wills

An inadequate chief executive officer's time at the top is always too long no matter how short. — Malcolm Forbes

The mayor of New York is the chief executive of the city. It is a complex organization and it requires the requisite skills to understand how to be the leader of the people and manage the government of N.Y. — Joseph J. Lhota

I believe that if you go and ask a chief executive of a Goldman Sachs or a BP, and they answer you honestly ... they want monopolies, they want government subsidies, they want preferences - they're not interested in free markets. — Ian Bremmer

A market where chief executive officers make 262 times that of the average worker and 821 times that of the minimum-wage worker is not a market that is working well. And it is surely not working well enough to build a solid middle class. — Marcy Kaptur

At the heart of any good business is a chief executive officer with one. — Malcolm Forbes