Gus Van Sant Quotes

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

If in doubt, move decisions up to the President.

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

In a corporation, there can only be one guy in the end: the CEO.

You can't build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.

I think there's few cases in history where the C.E.O. steps down and is also the founder and reports to someone and that works.

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.

Being a president is being a CEO, essentially.

Most of the time nothing much is required of directors, which is a pity.

I'd be resentful if shareholders who don't know the business tried to tell me what to do.

Clearly, as a CEO, you have other functions that are managed by other people.

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

By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish.

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

In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.

I'm going to continue doing my thing and work my butt off to add value for shareholders and as long as they and the board see fit to keep me in this role, I feel enormously privileged to serve.

Being a consultant is like flying first-class. The food is terrific, the drinks are cold. But all you can do is walk up to the pilot and say, 'bank left.' If you're in management, you have the controls.

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.

Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.

[Describing her role:] It's like running a big corporation and a little country at the same time.

A lot of companies have teams, but they are not really independent. They still have to get stuff approved by the boss. You have to change how and where decisions are made. If the hierarchy makes the decision, it will be based on politics.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.

Who my successor is will be up to the board, not me.

I'm the non-executive chairman of nine or so major companies, and on the nine companies, it's a little trying because you jump from one industry to another, as the case might be. But one had the reasonable knowledge of those nine activities, and it's been an exciting job.