Scott Weiss Quotes

Most companies overlook the most basic of all training functions: the onboarding of new employees into their corporate culture.

If you're building a startup or any sort of organization, take a few moments to reflect on the qualities that the people you most enjoy working with embody and the user experience of new people joining your organization, from the offer letter to their first day.

My gift, if I have one, is choosing terrific talent and providing the atmosphere for them to do their best work.

I think that if you run a big company, you've got to, four or five times a year, just say, 'Hey team, look, here's where we're going.' If you do it 10 times, nobody wants to work for you. If you do it zero times, you have anarchy.

You know, as most entrepreneurs do, that a company is only as good as its people. The hard part is actually building the team that will embody your company's culture and propel you forward.

The most important part of any acquisition is your ability to culturally integrate the people in the companies you acquire and your company.

Someone asked me about what's it like managing 2.2 million associates, and I said, 'When they're Wal-Mart associates, it's not all that hard because of the quality and the depth of our talent.' I'm really proud of the fact that 70% of the managers in the U.S. started as hourly associates with our company.

Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.

Managers develop organisations; leaders develop people.

I've trained my people in mentoring entrepreneurs and made myself obsolete.

When we start a new store, we make sure that we transfer enough starter culture from other stores that are already Whole Fooders, who've already incorporated our values and our culture within themselves into the... into the store.

At HBO, my leadership had to inspire and gain the respect of employees in a large company with over 100 external business relationships in dozens of countries.

I enjoyed the promotion with K9 on my introduction day.

The first day, week and month of an employee's experience carries a lasting impression.

As CEO of a big company, I have to be a kind of a champion of the interests of our people as insofar as their ability to do their job, to feel comfortable in their work environment, and to be able to fulfill their ambitions.

About every other week, I sit down with all of our new Zynga hires and I talk to them for about 90 minutes, have an open Q&A. There is no formal presentation. I talk about our values, where they came from and why they are so important, and I ask them to challenge those values.

As far as employees are concerned, clearly I like to communicate with them, since we are more than 40,000 people. I like to communicate either through e-mail or through video conferencing, which we do very often, and stream out videos and interviews. But more than that, I believe in traveling to my branches.

Every new HubSpot employee has to go through training to learn how to use the software. That's a good idea, and it also keeps me from having to worry about what I'm supposed to be doing here or why Cranium, who hired me, still has never come by to say hello or talk about what he wants me to work on.

For a startup to overcome obstacles and succeed, it must foster limitless thinking. By hiring students into their first career job, you get to set their framework for how a company functions and instill them with your values for your company's culture.

Company culture is my number one priority. It's more important than the team, the product, the business model, or the investors. All of those things can be fixed and made better over time. But culture has to be established on Day 1.

For the label to grow, it has to have great executives who understand the culture, understand the mission, and can lead. I don't want to be part of every decision.

To scale your business, you need to delegate responsibilities to others and establish a strong company culture.

No one gave me a recipe for how to create company culture. I wish I had had one.

Not a manager or an executive yet? It's not too early to practice. Many companies are always looking for people to volunteer to help coordinate happy hours, onboard new employees, or plan the holiday party.

Great leadership and great companies aren't built overnight, and they're not built without capital. And capital can sometimes be counter-productive to building a great culture.