Ted Waitt Quotes

We are ready to say that we rule the entire Elgin enterprise as irrelevant to the present.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

Obviously I've got a great team of people within the company. You can't operate all by yourself. We have a good board of directors and a big bench, and they can make decisions if I'm not around.

Clearly, every company needs a leader. That's an important part of being the CEO of the company.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.

I understand that bureaucracy, hierarchy and managing politics is not easy.

An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It's always redefining its 'core business' in ways that open up new avenues for growth.

As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.

Clearly, as a CEO, you have other functions that are managed by other people.

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.

The biggest challenge for everybody to realize out there is that we're in a very complicated business world and that were all under one umbrella and it's very challenging for everybody to figure out where the priorities lie and where the loyalties lie.

I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate resources to navigate between them.

There's smarter people than me. But you cannot have any one guy running 18 billion-dollar businesses. It just doesn't make sense to me. I've met some extraordinary leaders in my time. They struggle with running one billion-dollar business.

In business, you try to solve problems.

A big company is like trying to steer a luxury liner.

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

Managing a business, small or large, today requires an extremely disciplined, thoughtful approach with regard to the pressure that people are under.

In the U.S., we didn't have scale, and without scale, it's difficult to operate.

I like being part of a big company's executive team. It's fun to stretch other parts of my brain, considering questions like, 'How should we think of acquisitions?' I get to be privy to things that would never come up at a small company.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

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

The most common way to grow a business is by overseeing each and every aspect of the company - the 'ground up' method.