Jack Ma Quotes

The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.

The opportunist thinks of me and today. The statesman thinks of us and tomorrow.

Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

A leader not only has to be in the center but also be in the future.

You politicians have got to look further ahead; you always got a Putter in your hands, when you ought to have a Driver.

Leaders make decisions that create the future they desire.

My job is to think beyond the immediate.

if you wish to train yourself for higher executive positions, the first thing for you to decide is what you are training for. Ability to dominate or manipulate others? That ought to be easy enough, since most of the magazines advertise sure ways of developing something they call 'personality.' But I am convinced that the first essential of business success is the capacity for organized thinking.

The one thing I have learned as a CEO is that leadership at various levels is vastly different. When I was leading a function or a business, there were certain demands and requirements to be a leader. As you move up the organization, the requirements for leading that organization don't grow vertically; they grow exponentially.

In sports and in business, the greatest leaders are those who make the best decisions in the most crucial of situations. They are the ones who focus their energy on turning tough decisions into winning decisions.

I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious.

Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.

America would be a better place if leaders would do more long-term thinking.

Great leadership can be a difficult thing to pin down and understand. You know a great leader when you're working for one, but even they can have a hard time articulating what it is that makes their leadership so effective.

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

I think a leader has many roles to play. So, you know, one role is that of incubating talent; the other is that of being a strategist. It's a very interesting job I've got.

There are certain skills that business people have that are - that are, in fact, helpful in - when it comes to being in political leadership.

Business requires understanding financial matters, but management is different from running the financial aspects of the business - it requires understanding complex systems, how they operate, the nature of organisations, what happens when people interact in groups and how to motivate and guide people.

Being mayor takes a certain amount of creativity.

President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt always had a wider point of view, of necessity, than I did.

Governing is about making tough decisions, but it's also about figuring out a better way to do things.

I think effective leaders typically are able to see the future to a certain degree and then try to take actions to shape it in some way.

I'm really more of an executive.