Brian Acton Quotes

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.

At the end of the day, you want to do what's best for your organization, present and future.

Success in M&As comes with executing with vigour along with the obvious right choices that you got to make.

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

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

Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.

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.

Lot of companies are looking for advisory work on business strategy, restructuring work.

I was a corporate hatchet man, and it's impossible for me to turn that off. It's this curse when I walk into businesses: 'That needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed.'

Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.

As the leadership team, we're taking bold and decisive action to evolve our organization and culture. This includes difficult steps, but they are necessary to position Microsoft for future growth and industry leadership.

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

Innovation and corporate governance are extremely important to improve the profitability of Japanese companies and encourage them to increase wages, capital spending, and dividends.

If guys try to make a bigger company for the sake of size, they don't create value in most cases.

CEOs resign when the internal dynamics of the company and the external dynamics of the company actually come together to say it is appropriate. When the internal dynamics ask you whether you have a replacement. I think the transition from CEOships have also become cartoonish.

I think there are certain business matters which we must now conduct differently than we used to.

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.

I never took classic business classes in college, so I don't have the background that any of the people running large companies have.

At this stage in my career, I don't have to take any big risks. You want to take a calculated risk, not one that leads to people saying 'yes, but there was that one time when she made that big mistake.' It's always a shame when that happens, especially if you've gotten by for decades without anything hugely tragic.

My business is the analytical framework.

As anyone who has covered the company for any length of time knows, Yahoo's record on major decision-making has been akin to a hippie commune - a lot of wrangling internally in a culture where everyone seems to have a voice and a reticence to push the button to launch.

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.

We are quite open, however, to looking at acquisitions and there are opportunities that we periodically consider. and I think that may be something we do in the future, but I must say that there is no commitment to that at the present time in any form or size.

I find myself using the word 'executives' now.

The thorniest business problems will surface at the board meetings, and the different, sharp opinions help to better explore the poles of the arguments to make better decisions.