Michael Eisner Quotes

I moved back to Boston and joined some of my Harvard classmates at Bain & Co. I quickly realized I enjoyed business.

I started my career at General Electric in a small office under a guy named Greg Liemandt, and his direct boss was Jack Welch. I would say those two have had the most profound impact on my career.

I was going to get a degree in economics and be a teacher. But I couldn't afford to pay for the education. So I just got the MBA and not the doctorate. I loved it at Bain, and I've been there ever since.

With some exceptions, the wrong people are running U.S. companies. It's been that way for years, and it hasn't gotten much better.

I would love to see Mr. (Henry) Ford in there, really. I don't know who started the idea that a President must be a Politician instead of a Business man. A Politician can't run any other kind of business. So there is no reason why he can run the U.S. That's the biggest single business in the World.

Donald Trump says he wants to run America like he's running his business? God help us.

Obama administration didn't have one person who had ever worked in business. Not one Obama cabinet member had ever seriously had a job, run a company, met a payroll in the American economy. And, as such, no way of understanding how business is done, from negotiations to any other aspect of it. In fact, people in Obama's cabinet were arrogant and condescending and looking down on those people as a bunch of shysters and a bunch of cheats and people that kill their customers and they're destroying the planet.

Donald Trump is as decisive as anybody I've ever met. I just don't see him running around asking various people in his inner circle, "What do you think I ought to do here?" I think he knows what he wants to do, and he seeks support for it or talks to people that oppose him and he may listen to them. But I don't think he's indecisive at all.

When a young woman tells me that she wants to become and actor, I say, 'No, be a writer. Or go to business school and learn how to run a studio.' The only real change will come from behind the scenes.

If Roman Abramovich helped me out in training we would be bottom of the league and if I had to work in his world of big business, we would be bankrupt!

A great company in the media business needs visionary leaders, not a conglomerate structure headquartered in Columbus Circle that second guesses.

What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.

I went to college as a theater major. But after about three weeks of that, I changed to the school of fine arts as a painter.

I have had fun running all of the Virgin businesses, so I never see a setback as a bad experience; it is just a learning curve.

I really admire the job that not just coach Belichick has done but that Robert Kraft and his family have done, and the decisions that they made to let Bill do what he's capable of doing. I think it's a great illustration of a way to structure an NFL organization when you let the coach really run the thing.

It's competition. It's putting them in environments, in situations where I want to see who the fighters are and who they guys are that are going to compete. And there will be rewards at the end of the day. Gatorade if you win. You drink out of a water hose if you lose and do some running. And that includes the coaching staff.

By the time I got to high school I knew what I was gonna do. Mainly because I looked around and saw there wasn't much else I was able to do. I was a criminal. I was a juvenile delinquent.

One of the things about leadership is that you cannot be a moderate, balanced, thoughtful, careful articulator of policy. You've got to be on the lunatic fringe.

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather control, the work of their teams. They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur-not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator.

Art school is a very difficult thing to run in a generous, humane way, because academic power is somehow very corrupting.

I got interested in the justice system. If I was, I'd probably be a defense lawyer. I was headed that way, but luckily changed my track to film school.

I'm sure the England selectors thought if they took me on and gave me the job, I'd want to run the show. They were shrewd, because that's exactly what I would have done.

Put the money into schools. Rational ones that train young minds to think, to demand that persons in authority show the evidence for the ideas they push. Do that, and we won't need to provide a world for the Sacred Brethren who, given the opportunity, would run everyone else off the planet.

The people who run the international tests told us, "the biggest predictor of student success is choice." Nations that "attach the money to the kids" and thereby allow parents to choose between different public and private schools have higher test scores. This should be no surprise; competition makes us better.

Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.