Lee Iacocca Quotes

Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that - it's hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate 'em.

You know, as most entrepreneurs do, that a company is only as good as its people. The hard part is actually building the team that will embody your company's culture and propel you forward.

I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.

Just about anyone can make a good product, but it's the people that count. In the end, it's the employees who will take it from a kitchen-table idea to the next level. There are a lot of important things in business, but the people portion comes first.

The most important thing is that you hire people who complement you and are better than you in specific areas. Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players.

Company culture is my number one priority. It's more important than the team, the product, the business model, or the investors. All of those things can be fixed and made better over time. But culture has to be established on Day 1.

If you hire great people, and they're all self-motivated, then you can get by without a lot of structure.

When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.

How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.

When you hire good people, and you provide good jobs and good wages and a career, good things are going to happen.

The best way to be productive is to have a great team. So I spend more time than most CEOs on human resources. That's 20 percent of my week.

We would rather have our employees running our business.

As a CEO, you get sucked into dealing with all the tasks of being a CEO. There's a big meeting, a big discussion, and you get into all the big issues, which is your job. But what CEOs often lose sight of is that it's all about the people who work for you. For every 1,000 decisions, 999 were being made when I was not in the room.

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 most valuable lesson I learned in dealing with the ups and downs was to invest in my employees - to do all I could for them when the times were good.

The supermarket chain Whole Foods has quite a radical employee empowerment program, where employees get to decide whether another employee can work in their team or not. If they think this person's a slacker, doesn't have good ideas, they can vote and say, no, we don't want this person to be working with us on the vegetable aisle.

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

Customers are using BetterWorks in a number of creative ways to reward and incentivize employees.

People are definitely a company's greatest asset. It doesn't make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

The players make the manager, it's never the other way.

Few people would doubt that Mark Zuckerberg would build a great product. But I, at least, would never have expected him to become so great at hiring, motivating, managing, and ultimately getting whatever it is his company needs from people.

I try to motivate people and align our individual incentives with organizational incentives. And then let people do their best.

If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it you almost don't have to manage them.

All we do is sign great teams, and stay out of the way. The rest will take care of itself.