Frans van Houten Quotes

When I came into the CEO office, I basically changed the entire management team. We knew that we had to change the company, so we needed a new set of leaders.

In business, sometimes you have to change the CEO in order to change the direction of the company.

Well, if you look back, in almost two and a half years, the biggest change probably was in late 2000 when we decided to totally change the CA business model.

Italian companies need to re-convert themselves, and such a re-conversion must be toward a better, higher standard.

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.

The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses.

When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change.

I spent some time studying Toyota, because how could a loom maker - they made looms. That was their business for 50 years, 35 years - and then they decided to go into the car business after everyone else was in the car business.

The emergence of Uber X was really the most important pivot maybe in the history of Silicon Valley. It's a vast majority of Uber's revenues, and so that flexibility and the rapid growth and the fighting the battles, it's all Travis. You can't take any credit away from him.

I've always flagged that it will take some time to gradually sell down our interest in lighting and basically pivot to be a medtech company focused entirely on health technology.

We have transformed Philips into a focused leader in health technology, delivering innovation to help people manage their health.

When you're in a turnaround situation, you cannot incrementalize your way out of it.

The strategic plan to transform Valeant smartly focuses on rebuilding the company's core franchises in ophthalmology, dermatology, and gastroenterology while simultaneously using the proceeds from the sale of non-core assets and operating cash flow to de-lever the company.

For a hot-shot CEO taking over a troubled company, mass firings are the ultimate quick fix, the accounting equivalent of crack: cheap, easy to score, instantly gratifying, and highly addictive.

By innovating and investing in health technology, we believe that we can really change the future of health.

The iPad is an amazing phenomenon. It is disrupting the enterprise. If you are an average employee, you can do anything for HR and Finance on the iPad.

After seven extraordinary and fulfilling years, during which we have transformed TalkTalk's customer experience and laid the foundations for long-term growth, I've decided it's time for me to start handing over the reins at TalkTalk and focus more on my activities in public service.

At some point, Apple will become much more aggressive and much more daring in taking their brand and capital to really reshaping markets.

The idea is not to restructure the economy as much as to seize the opportunities available that we didn't address before.

For an emerging market that hopes to be the third largest economy in the world, you cannot do it without being innovative and disruptive. There is no choice in the matter.

I don't think the disruptor and the business model of a disruptor necessarily is an indication of the topography of the future. If it did, you would say then that everyone will make high-end electric cars, when the answer is clearly no.

In many cases, companies use the crisis moments to pivot to do better. We like to be part of that.

The opportunity to build new and surprising partnerships to help Microsoft succeed in a mobile-first, cloud-first world is truly exciting, and I look forward to leading these efforts.

Biotech research is incredibly important for health-care innovation.