Chip Conley Quotes

I've never been in a business where safety performance was excellent and the business performance was not, so they go hand in hand, and for me, safety performance is an indication of discipline, of focus and of how joined up an organisation is.

Some corporations are extremely well managed; some nonprofit organizations are. It has nothing to do with the sector. It has to do with quality of management.

The main professional responsibility of a person in business is business.

A business of high principle generates greater drive and effectiveness because people know that they can do the right thing decisively and with confidence.

I think they, Peter McCullough was, turns out was not a good CEO.

If the staff lacks policy guidance against which to test decisions, their decisions will be random.

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

History has shown that one cannot legislate a culture of integrity. And yet, one of the paramount responsibilities and challenges of corporate leadership is to ensure such a culture.

When I wear the hat of management, it is important that our management behaves and conducts as management accountable to the board.

In every business, in every industry, management does matter.

Strategic Work is all about the big questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Tactical Work is all about answers: This is the system we use to do each task. This is how we do it, how we measure it, how we monitor it.

First of all, you've got to have a vision of 'What kind of program do I want to have?' Then you've got to have a plan to implement it. Then you've got to set the example that you want, develop the principles and values that are important, and get people to buy into it.

Government doesn't have a high tolerance for failure.

We are a very systems- and process- driven business which reports directly to the board, whether it is risk or legal.

I think having a visionary CEO is awesome, and visionary leadership is one thing, but you also need checks and balances on whether this company can withstand a very honest and critical look at itself.

In business, there's a constant focus on developing strategies, reviewing executive performance against those strategies each year, engaging with opposing or different points of view, and having intellectual dialogue.

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

A business like an automobile, has to be driven, in order to get results.

If you're going to be successful, you better have a goal, you better find really good people, better understand where all the money's coming from. And you better measure the living daylights out of it.

The good thing about execution issues are that they are within our control.

But tending machinery was one thing; defining what we were trying to do and why we were doing it, and developing ways to measure how well the job was done - this was something else again.

When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.

A plan is always successful if the plan is good.

Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die.