Ben Horowitz Quotes

Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.

I think if you want to be a successful president or a manager of a team, you need to understand what the business is all about because you have to deal with the business side of the game to be able to do what you need to do.

He's a tremendous guy. And what's more, he's virtually a genius in the field of management.

Leadership is all about emotional intelligence. Management is taught, while leadership is experienced.

I do believe I have certain strengths as a female CEO, such as having another level of awareness through emotional intelligence.

I seek out a lot of advice from other CEOs.

Great leadership can be a difficult thing to pin down and understand. You know a great leader when you're working for one, but even they can have a hard time articulating what it is that makes their leadership so effective.

A CEO needs to build their own team.

Too many talk about a company's leadership, referring to the senior most executives in the organization. They are just that: senior executives. Leadership doesn't automatically happen when you reach a certain pay grade. Hopefully you find it there, but there are no guarantees.

I think that business leaders today have to be more rounded than they used to be, they have to be completely multi-functional and fast-moving.

Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.

I’m an executive now. I have to be a bigger leader, more responsible leader, more careful about how I say things….

I like to think I'll be quite instinctive as a leader.

[T]here's a difference between confident leadership and empty-headed delusion or cheerleading. And this is a difference that many CEOs miss.

A leader should be a visionary and have more foresight than an employee.

The one thing I have learned as a CEO is that leadership at various levels is vastly different. When I was leading a function or a business, there were certain demands and requirements to be a leader. As you move up the organization, the requirements for leading that organization don't grow vertically; they grow exponentially.

I think you need a really strong businessperson running the state, a person who's used to turning negatives into positives, which is what happens in business.

I think Ronald Reagan was one of the great presidents, period, not just recently. I thought he had the demeanor. I thought he had the bearing. I thought he had the thought process.

Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.

I need to aspire to be a great CEO and not just a great product engineer.

You don't have to be popular with the players to be a good manager or coach.

A C.E.O.'s job is leadership, problem solving, and team building. I've done that my whole career.

When you're C.E.O., you have to have two conditions: first, shareholders need to trust you and want you to head your company. The second is that you need to feel the motivation to do the job. So, as long as both are reunited, you continue to do the job. And today, they are reunited.

Look, you need technical skills to run a company.

Decisiveness is the one word that makes a good manager.