Martin Sorrell Quotes

If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all.

There's smarter people than me. But you cannot have any one guy running 18 billion-dollar businesses. It just doesn't make sense to me. I've met some extraordinary leaders in my time. They struggle with running one billion-dollar business.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

Sometimes Jonathan [Powell] and myself would go to Tony [Blair] and ask him if he was absolutely sure about this or that. That was our job. But ultimately it was his decision.

I don't think I was talking specifically about Steve Jobs. It was just a general philosophy about one person grows up and he's kind of managing companies and every day he's working making sure this is in place and that's in place.

Being a president is being a CEO, essentially.

No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.

Nowadays children look at everyone in the magazines and they want to be a basketball star or on a television show, but there is only so many people who can do those things and not that you shouldn't aim or dream for these things, but there are so many other fantastic jobs. So it's good to talk about how to get there and how difficult it is to get there.

All the great enterprises of the world are run by a few smart men: their aides and associates run down by rapid stages to the level of sheer morons. Everyone knows that this is true of government, but we often forget that it is equally true of private undertakings. In the average great bank, or railroad, or other corporation the burden of management lies upon a small group. The rest are ciphers.

I never used golf as a job. I used it as a game. I always thought if I played the game well, my financial rewards would be there, but it came from, because I played well. But I had to play well to get the financial rewards.

Even though I'm on a show that I love with people that I love - I have basically the dream job - that doesn't mean I'm not getting rejected on a daily basis.

The younger generation of rocket engineers is just beginning. They are of the new generation to which space travel is not going to be a dream of the future but an everyday job with everyday worries in which they will be engaged.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

The prime occupational hazard of a manager is superficiality.

And this - this board was - was impanelled in 1951. And it's gone through ups and downs in how the secretaries have used it. But I have put a premium on that advisory board.

A loss leads to victory, being fired leads to a dream job..I find comfort in believing that good things can grow out of tragedy.

Small unit democracy, I found early on, didn't work for me.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.

We can't wait for Congress to do its job. So where they won't act, I will.

One reason (among many) that women may well take over the world of "virtual enterprises" is that they seem to have a greater instinct for networking. And the unfettered-by-machismo males who have taken to networking will do better than those who shun it as "sissy stuff." But truth is, it has always been the age of "networkers"; and in an era where organizations depend more and more on tenuously connected outsiders to get the job done, it will only become so.

President Obama recently sat down with ESPN and said the NCAA should reduce the shot clock for basketball games. Then he said, 'And while we're at it, is there any way they can reduce the 'being president clock?'

The distribution of patronage of the Government is by far the most disagreeable duty of the President.

The world is not checking in with us to see what skills we've picked up, what idea we've concocted, what dreams we carry in our hearts. When a job opens, whether it's in the chorus line or on the assembly line, it goes to the person standing there. It goes to the eager beaver the boss sees when he looks up from his work: the pint-sized kid standing at the basketball court on the playground waiting for one of the older boys to head home. "Hey, kid, wanna play?"

I think ultimately what you really want is a few people within any label that are into the band enough to really work on it every day for a long time and to actually try a little bit. But obviously, the major labels have more money to spend, so if they feel like spending it, they have bigger resources there when you need them. It doesn't always necessarily translate into them doing a better job for a band, but I think especially if you're playing the game of commercial radio and making videos and stuff like that, that's sort of an expensive proposition.

Obama administration didn't have one person who had ever worked in business. Not one Obama cabinet member had ever seriously had a job, run a company, met a payroll in the American economy. And, as such, no way of understanding how business is done, from negotiations to any other aspect of it. In fact, people in Obama's cabinet were arrogant and condescending and looking down on those people as a bunch of shysters and a bunch of cheats and people that kill their customers and they're destroying the planet.