Mark V. Hurd Quotes

The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them.

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

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

The distinction between a statesman and a politician is that the former imposes his will and his ideas on his environment while the latter adopts himself to it.

Governing is about making tough decisions, but it's also about figuring out a better way to do things.

There are people who are better managers than I am. I aspire to be a really good manager, but it's not my natural personality to do the same thing for 14 hours a day. I have a lot of different interests. I really like product and strategy and business strategy, and I think I'm not bad at it.

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

The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn't do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.

This is easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but I think it once again points out how very important style of leadership, that is the way he does what he does, is to his perception.

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious.

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

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset.

Well, the first quality of being a good leader is you have to be able to follow. See, a good leader can't just be the leader all the time, I have to be able to follow.

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

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.

Effective management always means asking the right question.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

If I spend all of my day in the details as a CEO of a company like Wal-Mart, I think it would be trouble, because I wouldn't really be prepared to speak to the big issues that the country or the world should face.

As for leadership, I am the kind who leads reluctantly and more by example than anything else. Someone had to be on the incorporation papers as president.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

It's so easy to make things complicated in business.

In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.