Jeff Jarrett Quotes

When the head of the Hyundai Motor Company, Chung Mong-koo, was fighting with his younger brother Chung Mong-hun over the company's management, he is said to have consulted a fortune-teller.

Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.

I was on the verge of taking over a company myself, from my father, before I left Knoxville to become an actor. I was also a company commander in Korea, so I had some sense of how powerful authority can be. How dangerous it can be.

Turner Broadcasting went from a very entrepreneurial, risk-taking company where I had a tremendous amount of freedom and autonomy to a corporate, bureaucratic nightmare.

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

In business, there's a constant focus on developing strategies, reviewing executive performance against those strategies each year, engaging with opposing or different points of view, and having intellectual dialogue.

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

Quite often, people who build big businesses don't believe anyone else can run them, and you end up with an old rascal in their 70s and no one to take them on. I could name several - and I won't - who put themselves in that invidious position.

Are the things that now, in retrospect, with what I've seen happen to my company, would I have done some things differently? I think - I think we all would do - we would do a number of things differently.

In Hong Kong, the directors are the idea men.

The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.

Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.

We have very strong succession plans across all group companies. But we do not comment on it. The retirement age is 60 years, but it does not apply to family professionals who work in the business.

One has to live with the fact that some corporate decisions are going to be wrong. As long as most of the decisions are right.

Early in my career, I sometimes found it difficult to make the tough people decisions - I had to learn that. In business, you want to listen. You want to learn. You want to make sure you're not proceeding without information. But if you wait too long, you can actually hurt an organization even more.

I read the Steve Jobs book, and that kind of changed everything. I've been, like, an Apple geek my whole life and have always seen him as a hero. But reading the book, and learning about how he built the company, and maintaining that corporate culture and all that, I think that influenced me a lot.

My business issues are just that - business - and I deal with them like they are business.

In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.

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

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.

You can't build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.

Sealed Management

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

I think every company has its own unique approach to creating shareholder value.

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