Michael Otto Quotes

You have to make your company idiot-proof because you may have an idiot running it some day.

I have to let the general manager do what makes the most sense, or I can't hold him accountable.

You try and learn from some people's mistakes. But you have to really trust the people who are working for you because they make a lot of decisions that could either do well for you or really screw up your image.

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.

If the staff lacks policy guidance against which to test decisions, their decisions will be random.

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

I'm the CEO; I'm the one who should be looking out for risk.

I may believe in something, but if it is not working and is not giving returns, we have to close it down because that is the right thing to do for the shareholders.

The goal isn't just to make transactions: it's to make better decisions in the way you run your business. If that's not at the top of every executive's priorities, then they shouldn't be an executive.

You can't look into a crystal ball but what you can say is if money is put on the table and you get half your signings right then you are going to be better next time around.

In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

But you don't get into a business because of personal tastes.

Fortunately we're not a public company - we're a private group of companies, and I can do what I want.

The key, I think, from a business point of view, is to learn how to be efficient in making a record that's not too expensive, so that you're not going crazy spending tons of money making a product that might not ever return that money.

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

One thing I'm so grateful for is sidestepping the usual venture capital, private equity route. My friends who have gone that way are many times beholden to their boards of directors, to 'sell' ideas to a team.

In my opinion, the most important thing in governance is management control.

Managerial discretion can take many forms, some very subtle. Individual managers may run slack operations; they may pursue subgoals that are at variance with corporate purposes; they can engage in self-dealing.

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.

Leaders respond when they perceive that there will be a political cost of inaction.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

Sealed Management

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

If heads don’t roll, nobody makes any changes