Warren Buffett Quotes

In a network situation, a vice president, while he's shaving, can decide your history.

You don't characterize CEOs as dealmakers or in any one particular area. An important characteristic of a CEO is leader. That's probably the most important characteristic.

You don't think, when you start a company as the founding CEO, that if your venture actually works, you end up with three jobs: founder, CEO, and chair of the board. The first eight years at Bonobos, I have learned a lot about the tension between the first two. It didn't even occur to me that I had the third job until much later.

Franck Muller has been very supportive during our acquisition process.

As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important.

Don't mess with Sergio Marchionne.

I'm interested in institutions, particularly in the way institutions close ranks. They have hierarchies and their own ethics.

Shareholders, of course, have every right to weigh in on whether (or how) they want a company to exercise political influence.

It's my experience at Fiat and, now, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles that when there is a very strong CEO, it's a good thing to be chairman.

Somebody we never talk about is Stephanie McMahon. She is such a huge power influence in our company. She is always pushing us to go the limit, and she doesn't take much credit for what she's done.

Because one of the main jobs of a CEO is to set the vision and strategy for the company, I'm a big believer in making one of the founders the default CEO.

When I was 28, running products for a company I'd co-founded, the CEO called to say that I had a problem with the board, that I probably couldn't overcome it, that I'd have to leave the company.

I'm with the president nearly every day. We engage in complex conversations about some of the most weighty matters facing the world. I deliver to him this exquisite product that's been developed by my officers. He engages in a way that shows his understanding of the complexity. He asks really hard questions. He delivers policy outcomes based on the information that we provide him. My observation of the president is that, we deal in serious matters.

In a large successful company where your power base as CEO isn't all that secure, it's hard for a CEO to pursue a truly disruptive strategy.

At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You've got denial, you've got everything in the world. You've got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely.

To understand the present with its full, rich significance, the mind must free itself from the habit of self-protecting acquisition; when it is utterly naked, then there is immortality.

I'm a shareholder in Microsoft Corp. of some size, and while I don't work for the place anymore, I think a lot about that investment, how - as an outsider - might I add value or not add value? Do I believe that things are headed in a good direction? So I wouldn't say I spend the majority of my time on that, but I spend some time on that as well.

At the time we acquired Viacom, everyone said I had overpaid. But even at today's depressed prices, that investment is worth billions. Everyone was saying MTV was a fad. I knew better.

Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg von Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution.

The CEO is, by far, the most important decision for a company... The company is going to rise and fall with the CEO.

Over the last 40 years, I have built MW into a multi-billion dollar company with amazing employees and loyal customers who value the products and service they receive at MW. Over the past several months I have expressed my concerns to the Board about the direction the company is currently heading.Instead of fostering the kind of dialogue in the Boardroom that has in part contributed to our success, the Board has inappropriately chosen to silence my concerns through termination as an executive officer.

CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it.

My job is a decision-making job, and as a result, I make a lot of decisions.

Being a president is being a CEO, essentially.

Systematic decision review also shows executives their own weaknesses, particularly the areas in which they are simply incompetent. In these areas, smart executives don't make decisions or take actions. They delegate.