James P. Gorman Quotes

Quality starts in the boardroom.

I'm a capitalist, I'm a CEO, I run a big business, I'm an employer.

I think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

I've always had an interest in business, and my interest in business has really expanded over the years.

I was always fascinated by the decision-making process and the managerial process and just business in general.

In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me.

When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

I'm a business person at heart.

There are times when directors just don't know what they're doing.

I used to think business was 50 percent having the right people. Now I think it's 80 percent.

The United States is like a big company, and we need a CEO to run it.

Business principles are only as good as the practices that back them up.

I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.

What should be the aim of management? What is their job? Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide.

Being a CEO still means sitting across the table from big institutional investors and showing your leadership and having them believe in you.

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.

There are companies with management and companies with money. You can always find money. Management is the key to success in any business.

When I wear the hat of management, it is important that our management behaves and conducts as management accountable to the board.

In every business, in every industry, management does matter.

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

As a first-time CEO, I wasn't sure if I would scale to run IronPort long-term. But I wanted a legitimate shot at it.

The thorniest business problems will surface at the board meetings, and the different, sharp opinions help to better explore the poles of the arguments to make better decisions.

We had the controlling shares but we weren’t in control.