Christie Hefner Quotes

And I was asked if I would come and help with the recovery of this great British company, Cable and Wireless, and I'm delighted to become part of the new and very talented management that have been brought in to that company as well.

You can't delegate turning a company around.

I turned Compaq from a small company with troubles into a computer powerhouse. We can do the same at Intershop.

Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on.

I do think - as self-serving as it sounds - that I was the right person, given the very, very strong headwind we had from the economy and our own issues, to come back and rewrite the future of the company.

When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

Most of the clubs I have had, they have been in a precarious situation when I have taken over and I have had to change it, even going back to Scarborough and all that.

As the BBC approaches the final phase of decisions about its future, it will be important for those involved to be established in post and ready to take responsibility for implementation of the outcome.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

Well, you know, any defense force worth its salt has to be able to deal with uncertainty, has to be able to deal with events that we may not have planned for.

I try getting in front of as many opportunities as possible, but in the late '90s, I had no idea that I'd end up being CFO of a technology company. I'd no idea what venture capital was.

The question was, in a sense, at Princeton Review, how much value was I adding as a public company CEO. I was adding less than other people might've... I think you want to move on when you've given your best work and then feel that you're not going to add as much value moving forward.

I managed Hewlett Packard through the worst technology downturn in 25 years, the dotcom bust.

When businesses go through hard times, through down markets, what do they do is they challenge every basic assumption of how they operate. They innovate. They create disruption for a while that leads them to even greater heights when the economy turns around.

Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

Sure, you're an intelligent and highly capable individual, and you are learning a lot on the fly as you build your company. But you also need to come to terms with the fact that there are things you have chosen not to be an expert in.

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.

My job was to turn the company around and to give Time Warner a profitable Web business to spin off and a profitable access business that still throws off a tremendous amount of cash. I can check both of those boxes. I am done, and I feel good about what we've accomplished.

Mitt Romney turned businesses around in the private sector. He saved the Winter Olympics.

I started at Pillsbury as a manager in one of their analysis functions, then worked my way up the corporate ladder to become vice president. Moving to Burger King was an important moment in my career.

I had come out of retirement into a very difficult situation with the PeopleSoft takeover, got through it, and was having a good time, frankly. We just ran out of runway at PeopleSoft. Had we had another year, maybe two years, I think we would have made it.

We suffered a setback and there were too many trades until Dave Taylor came along and Charlie Simmer.

Digitas is a company that's very rapidly changing - the digital world changes every day. It's important we hire people who are curious about what's going on and who are willing to learn and want to learn. I look for core leadership traits.

I am honored to be able to serve GM at this critical juncture and take part in its reinvention.

I fell in love with the topic of leadership. For three decades, that has been a major focus of my hands-on work: listening to and working with leaders, their teams and their organizations.