Top Executives Quotes & Sayings

Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical power is not just the gun in the policeman's hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces; it extends through society from top to bottom, an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit in the oppression of millions is to die of natural causes. — CrimethInc.

Many organizations help businesses to stay on top of what's changing or likely to change. It's important for executives and managers who focus on a company's health coverage to stay up-to-speed on what's happening, and it's important for those in the C-suite to understand the changes to factor these new variables into their strategic planning calculus. — John E. McDonough

Marketing executives like big budgets, as big budgets make it easier to grow the top line. — Bill Gurley

For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck's top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats.* This "kill the company" exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain-framed activity in terms of losses. — Adam M. Grant

Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours. — Reid Hoffman

There are moments when television systems are young and haven't formed properly, and there's room for lots of original stuff. Then things become more and more top-heavy with executives who are trying to guarantee the success of things. — Terry Gilliam

The final ballots represent players, managers, executives and builders who are top-tier candidates and worthy of review for consideration for election to the Hall of Fame. — Fay Vincent

The sex difference in Agreeableness puts the debate about sex discrimination in society into an interesting light. The media tends to decry the fact that the prevalence of women chief executives of large corporations is very much lower than 50 per cent. But is this really evidence that discrimination is operating? It could equally well be the case that there is no discrimination, but that fewer women want to emphasize status gain at the expense of social connectedness. Given the known relationships between Agreeableness and career success, and the known sex differences in Agreeableness, you could actually work out the expected number of women in top positions if the market is blind to sex. It would not be zero, but it would be not be 50 per cent either. — Daniel Nettle

Fairchild Parent rewarded Fairchild Child's success the way all East Coast companies of the era did: it kept a sizable chunk of the profits to fund other company operations, and it promoted the people at the top of the division to a fancier position and a better salary for a job well done. Back in New Jersey, it didn't cross anyone's mind that this was exactly the wrong response to an egalitarian company that shared both risk and reward among all of its employees, whose executives had moved to California precisely to get away from the Old World of business, and which needed to plow most of its profits back into product development to stay ahead of the competition in a fast-moving take-no-prisoners industry. — Michael S. Malone

In the thirteenth chapter of Creativity, Inc., Catmull talks about how the leadership teams at Disney and Pixar found solutions to the problems that arose during the merge of the two companies. They solved the problem by asking everyone who worked in the company for solutions rather than just leaving it up to the executives, which became known as Notes Day. — Top 50 Facts

The classic problem as an entrepreneur is that they have a hard time delegating. But that's really crazy. Recruiting other executives is critical, so is dealing with customers and dealing with regulators. Those are functions that only the top founders can do. — Robert Pozen

The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, "Head for the hills!" the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn't make you a hero. — Ann Coulter

The sooner we associate long hours and multitasking with incompetence and carelessness the better. The next time you hear boasts of executives pulling an all-nighter or holding conference calls in their cars, be sure to offer your condolences; it's grim being stuck in sweatshops run by managers too ignorant to understand productivity and risk. Working people like this is as smart as running your factory without maintenance. In manufacturing and engineering businesses, everyone learns that the top priority is asset integrity: protecting the machinery on which the business depends. In knowledge-based economies, that machinery is the mind. — Margaret Heffernan

Government departments are arranged hierarchically; those at the top are used to issuing orders and expect them to be carried out by their subordinates right down the line. Minow assumed that a cultural institution like television has a similar hierarchical structure, as if television executives could requisition more creative programming the way a bureaucrat orders new pencils or department stationery. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation packages in the midst of this economic crisis is not only bad taste, it's bad strategy-and I will not tolerate it as president. — Barack Obama

The pay of many of our top executives in big hundred companies in the U.K. is outrageous and even obscene. — Justin Welby

The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no 'charisma' and little use either for the term or what it signifies." Supporting Drucker's claim, Brigham Young University management professor Bradley Agle studied the CEOs of 128 major companies and found that those considered charismatic by their top executives had bigger salaries but not better corporate performance. We — Susan Cain

Anyone who has followed the U.S. economy in recent years can tell you while corporate America and their wealthy executives have recovered from the last recession, middle-class families have not. About 95 percent of income gains between 2009 and 2012 went to the top one percent. — James P. Hoffa

Most Western managers believe that long-term success flows from a state of stability, harmony, predictability, discipline, and consensus-a state that I refer to as stable equilibrium. This belief leads them to demand general prescriptions that they can immediately convert into successful action. The most popular prescriptions are to formulate a vision of an organization's future state, to prepare long-term plans to realize that vision, to set strategic milestones and monitor achievements against those plans, to write mission statements and persuade people to share the same culture, to encourage widespread participation and consensus in decision making, and to install control systems that allow top executives to set the organization's direction and stay in command. — Ralph D. Stacey

It's always the end of the world," said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon's top executives. "You could set your watch on it arriving." He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. "The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader," he said. "Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity." Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011 — Russell Grandinetti

The purpose of work is not to make money. The purpose of work is to make the workers, whether working stiffs or top executives, feel good about life. — Ricardo Semler

One of the symptoms of a losing streak is a turnover of top executives. It's a revolving door. — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else. — Steven Rattner

Activision was promoting an adventure game called Pitfall Harry and had built a little jungle scene in which passersby could swing on a makeshift vine. In another room, a company called Zombie had a metal sphere that shot blue electric bolts through the air. But the id installation had a bit more in store: an eight-foot-tall vagina. Gwar, the scatological rock band that id had hired to produce the display, had pushed their renowned prurient theatrics to the edge. The vagina was lined with dozens of dildos to look like teeth. A bust of O. J. Simpson's decapitated head hung from the top. As the visitors walked through the vaginal mouth, two members of Gwar cloaked in fur and raw steak came leaping out of the shadows and pretended to attack them with rubber penises. The Microsoft executives were frozen. Then, to everyone's relief, they burst out laughing. — David Kushner

The quality most desirable in a CEO? According to a global survey conducted by IBM of 1,500 top executives in sixty countries: creativity. — Steven Kotler

I've always believed that culture is defined and created from the top down, but it comes to life from the bottom up. This meant that I had to build our culture by working with the leadership group (i.e., the owner, general manager, and executives), the coaching staff, and the football team. To strengthen the culture among the leadership group, it was important to reiterate to the owner, team president, and general manager the shared beliefs, values, and expectations that we had discussed in depth when I was interviewing for the head coaching position. It was important to have collaborative conversations on a regular basis to discuss the changes we were making and why we were making them. — Jon Gordon

For every rude executive who makes it to the top, there are nine successful executives with good manners. — Letitia Baldrige

Though top executives may work as hard as ever-in part perhaps because, being trained in an earlier day, they can hardly help doing so-their subordinates are somewhat less work-minded. — David Riesman

People like Mike McConnell don't really move from public office to the private sector and back again; that implies more separation than actually exists. Rather, the U.S. government and industry interests essentially form one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity - with a public division and a private one. When someone like McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government post in the same field, it's more like an intracorporate reassignment than it is like changing employers. When McConnell serves as DNI he's simply in one division of this entity, and when he's at Booz Allen he is in another. It's precisely the same way that Goldman Sachs officials endlessly move in and out of the Treasury Department and other government positions with financial authority, or the way that health care and oil executives move in and out of government agencies charged with regulating those fields. In — Glenn Greenwald

For a company culture to change, the top executives must be on board with changing it. This means they must understand what the change means for them. — Janet Gregory

When top executives get huge pay hikes at the same time as middle-level and hourly workers lose their jobs and retirement savings, or have to accept negligible pay raises and cuts in health and pension benefits, company morale plummets. I hear it all the time from employees: This company, they say, is being run only for the benefit of the people at the top. So why should we put in extra effort, commit extra hours, take on extra responsibilities? We'll do the minimum, even cut corners. This is often the death knell of a company. — Robert Reich

In two days he saw Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and the management of their Wall Street Journal; Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the top executives at the New York Times; and executives at Time, Fortune, and other Time Inc. magazines. "I would love to help quality journalism," he later said. "We can't depend on bloggers for our news. — Walter Isaacson

The owners and top managers of most news media organizations tend to be conservative and Republican. This is hardly surprising. The shareholders and executives of multi-billion-dollar corporations are not very interested in undermining the free enterprise system, for example, income from offended advertisers. These owners and managers ultimately decide which reporters, newscasters, and editors to hire or fire, promote or discourage. Journalists who want to get a head, therefore, may have to come to terms with the policies of the people who own and run media businesses. — Edward S. Greenberg

Deep caring about each other's fate does seem to be on the decline, but I do not believe that New Age narcissism is much to blame. The external causes of our moral indifference are a fragmented mass society that leaves us isolated and afraid, an economic system that puts the rights of capital before the rights of people, and a political process that makes citizens into ciphers.

These are the forces that allow, even encourage, unbridled competition, social irresponsibility, and the survival of the financially fittest. The executives who brought down the major corporations by taking indecent sums off the top while wage earners of modest means lost their retirement accounts were clearly more influenced by capitalist amorality than by some New Age guru. — Parker J. Palmer