Jeffrey R. Immelt Quotes

Apple was our benefactor at starting General Magic, but about a year later decided they would rather BE General Magic and tried to make us blink out of existence... which we eventually did, but it took a few years.

I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.

Even if Pfizer committed itself legally to maintaining some of its research and development in the U.K., its takeover of AstraZeneca would involve dismembering an excellent and strategically important British company.

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.

It's a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there.

You don't get a chance to buy a company like NBCUniversal unless it's not doing well.

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

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.

It's much more difficult running a business than buying one.

On what possible basis would I want to stop someone from buying BHS if I had tried to save it?

During the time of Webex growing from $0 to greater than $700M, the company was sold to Cisco. The Webex team lost the passion and drive to further grow the business because many Webex veterans left and Cisco's integration with Webex was not successful.

Professional services industries like finance, consulting, and legal services are, by definition, meta-industries. That is, they serve to help large companies raise money, buy and sell each other, reorganize, implement new systems, conduct complex transactions, and so forth.

James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and '60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.

Throughout my Enterprise career, I have been primarily operationally focused.

Ford had a number of different strategies over the years that they thought obviously made sense at the time, just like all the different brands, and also the regional operations.

It's difficult to fix a truly broken business, but when it happens, the returns can be extraordinary.

Many brands have lost their way in the process of evolving from a small company to a much bigger corporation.

As far as funding and building a team, you being romantically involved with your cofounder really shouldn't play a factor in how you run the company and how you create a team or find resources. It's all about the partnership.

Of course we want to pocket Fisker. But we will bid rationally. Whatever the result, nothing can stop us from making electric cars.

When you play hockey, you don't realize how much it takes to put a team together and the business people around the team, what they do to get the franchise to the next level.

I run businesses all around the United States, all around the globe.

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.

We are growing both in the U.S. and in India, and all our business plans are made accordingly. So we are expanding both in U.S. and in India.

When you buy a company that's been on its butt you raise a lot of money, you instantly put new management in place, but that's the end of the glory for three to five years, grinding it out one day after the other.

As I looked across the company, there are three things that keep coming up that we need to work on: culture, our operating rigor, and capital allocation.