Charles Koch Quotes

I learned that as a director, you're around all these talented people, so you have this window that all these really good ideas can come in to help your movie, so you're crazy to close them. You need to be inspiring people, engaging people. There are lots of people who are really good at their jobs but might not know or feel like they want to come up to people and get them to participate and want to do their best.

Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.

The thing I noticed, have learned the most about directors, is: when they're very confident in themselves, they're open to creativity from other people. If they're scared or nervous, then they shut off and nobody's ideas [count].

You can inspire people to give you greatness, or you can micro-manage them into your own one specific kernel of an idea. To me, I think that when you inspire people to give their best, then you're going to get the best result.

We should invest in people not ideas. A good idea is often destroyed by bad people and good people can always make a bad idea better.

Business is about people. It's about passion. It's about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Just imagine how fast, innovative and excellent your business will be once every single teammate - from the janitor to the executive - begins to see themselves as the CEO of their own area of responsibility.

It is the responsibility of leadership to provide opportunity, and the responsibility of individuals to contribute.

What I learned at LucasArts was, you don't make your bets on ideas: ideas are cheap. You make your bets on people.

Average leaders inspire people to punch a time clock. Great leaders inspire industry and passion.

A good head has one hundred hands.

Unless and until you inspire the people, you will not get results. Imposition will never give you the results. Inspiration will always give you the results.

Creating something new is the difficult part. To make it and build it and get everyone to follow? Amazing.

I'm rarely in a situation where, if you have a good idea, it's not embraced. That's stupid. And I don't work with stupid people.

Because when you work with a different team, the expectations are different and then you deliver in a very different way. You look back at it and you're proud of yourself. And when the same people come in and you do the same thing, it's boring. You could re-envision it again and again but when the new chemistry of ideas comes in, something happens as a team.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders.

Getting every employee's mind into the game is a huge part of what a CEO job is all about. Taking everyone's best ideas and transferring them to others is the secret. There's nothing more important.

Sometimes other people have better ideas.

The responsibility of leadership is not to come up with all the ideas but to create an environment in which great ideas can thrive.

Any kind of vision needs people.

I think what I am is a "convener"; I like to convene people around ideas.

We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.

I love being around people that contribute. It doesn't matter where the good idea comes from. A good idea is a good idea.