Ben Sasse Quotes

I believe being president of a private institution is a remarkable experience, but at Ohio State, it's a calling.

I'm a psychologist. I was a psychology faculty member, and then I became an administrator of the department, then the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. At the time of the presidential search, I was the dean.

In recent years, more and more of my time has become absorbed by administrative work for the research council of ETH-Z of which I am presently the president.

One of the major jobs of the Harvard president is to choose the deans. I've had the opportunity to choose a considerable number of deans already, so I've learned a lot in the process in doing it.

After forty years in the lab, I was asked in 1991 to become president of The Rockefeller University. Unlike a working scientist, being president for seven years provided an opportunity to interact with scientists in many different fields and broadened my scope of the natural sciences.

To be a dean, you have to be a salesman as well as a scholar.

It is of course true that many of our universities are large and complex organisations, requiring highly skilled individuals to run them effectively.

Being president of a major public university is the most political nonpolitical office around.

This line of research continued when I went, and brought my research group with me, to the new University of California, Irvine campus in 1966 to become the founding Dean of the School of Physical Sciences.

NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length.

I served as Dean until 1974, when I stepped down to return to full time teaching and research.

The legwork is always hard. Really finding people that you think are good enough. Just the definition of what we have to do is finding good enough people that you really think are special.

All companies of any size have to continue to push to make sure you get the right leaders, the right team, the right people to be fast acting, and fast moving in the marketplace. We've got great leaders, and we continue to attract and promote great new leaders.

The greatest luck that I've had has been the ability to find men and women who came into my administration who worked with me and brought extraordinary talents that we were able to take full advantage of.

There would not be enough talent that's educated, developed and ready to take on the next leadership challenge, and it would cap our growth. Now we've put programs in place not to have that happen, but that could be a weakness.

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world... If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.

A great advantage of a large corporation is supposed to be the large pool of talent in which its leaders can find and groom high achievers and successors.

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.

As a company grows from 25 to 50 to 100 to 200 to 500 to 1000 people, the characteristics of who is the very best talent in leadership roles will change. It's rarely the case that your leadership team at 1000 people is the same leadership team you had a 25 people.

I had come from Los Angeles - I had been there a partner of Gruen Associates, a large Los Angeles firm - and when the possibility of becoming a dean at Yale came, it was a very appropriate moment in my life. I was interested in a number of issues that I could not pursue while in a firm like Gruen's.

I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.

I've been president of Brown and chancellor of Vanderbilt, where they have very high completion rates.

I want the best people, not just on the banking side but on innovation and technology.

I'm a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics.

No beating around the bush. Give me the guys that are next in line, the guys that deserve it, and let's go.