Henry Kravis Quotes

I'm the C.E.O., nominated by the shareholders. If they're not happy, I have to take the consequences.

I'm willing to have two directors on the DuPont board, me being one of them.

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.

I was, as president and chairman of the board, required by law to verify the veracity of the financial figures, the assets under management, the number of outstanding shares, et cetera.

I've been around the bend in corporations.

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

I'm a CEO of a public company. You have to show decorum.

I'm in a different position than most CEO's. I'm a founder. I'm not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO's are hired by the board.

Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.

I'm on the Business Roundtable, the CEOs of the largest 100-odd companies in the country. Most of these people wanted very much to be the CEO of a large public company but realize that it's not exactly what they had anticipated, for lots of reasons. One is competition has gotten a lot worse, and more global.

Killing Intel, I, I just had to resign from the Apple Board.

CEOs resign when the internal dynamics of the company and the external dynamics of the company actually come together to say it is appropriate. When the internal dynamics ask you whether you have a replacement. I think the transition from CEOships have also become cartoonish.

Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.

The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

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.

I find myself using the word 'executives' now.

Companies the size of PepsiCo is like running a little republic, there is no question about it. The only difference is that I don't have to worry about the media hounding me every day, on every word that I say. I have a board of directors that runs the country in the interest of the stake holders.

I don't do any corporate work.

I'm the last senior executive who was hired by Roy Vagelos. It's an honor, but it also imposes upon me an obligation not only to think about his legacy but also about this company's legacy.

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

We need to be focused in corporate America on the long term.

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

You don't think, when you start a company as the founding CEO, that if your venture actually works, you end up with three jobs: founder, CEO, and chair of the board. The first eight years at Bonobos, I have learned a lot about the tension between the first two. It didn't even occur to me that I had the third job until much later.

The corporation is an out-of-control Frankenstein.