Michael Dell Quotes

I am honored to be able to serve GM at this critical juncture and take part in its reinvention.

If you give the boss all the decision-making power, they see the world through their eyes. The big innovations are generally such a shift that they won't see it. For a long time, it looked like it was just inevitable that you would get slow and bureaucratic.

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.

I had never been in charge of anything. I'd always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I'd never been in charge of an organization.

Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.

I don't want to be a director, or to have responsibility for hundreds of people.

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

Too many talk about a company's leadership, referring to the senior most executives in the organization. They are just that: senior executives. Leadership doesn't automatically happen when you reach a certain pay grade. Hopefully you find it there, but there are no guarantees.

My personal view is that organisations have a capacity to throw up extraordinary leaders to suit the occasion.

Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.

I used to think my job as a CEO meant managing metrics and meeting goals, but I've realised now that's it's about managing my board and employees.

I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

Clearly, every company needs a leader. That's an important part of being the CEO of the company.

I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.

A leadership culture is one where everyone thinks like an owner, a CEO or a managing director. It's one where everyone is entrepreneurial and proactive.

No matter how many or how few people you have reporting to you, you must remember that as you climb higher in the ranks, your words will be taken as commands even if you're just thinking out loud.

There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions.

Let me control personnel, and I will ultimately control policy.

My leadership style is to produce a fear of not changing..

After formulating and communicating the right strategy and optimizing operations to execute that strategy, CEOs and other top leaders then must be able to build management teams that truly understand the big picture.

I'm surprised sometimes at the responsibilities you have as a director.

John Akers once said that changing IBM's culture was more difficult than getting elephants to dance. Of course it's really difficult, as Lou Gerstner also found out years later. The title of his own book is Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? He and his top executives were change masters at IBM. All organizations, especially the larger ones, will always need change masters. Dissatisfaction with the status quo and efforts to improve it should be encouraged rather than discouraged. Regrettably, that is often not the case.

I have the experience we need to make the changes we want and I think that's a winning case.