When I was president of the company, I said, 'Okay, I can do this - piece of cake.' Then when you are the CEO, the responsibilities multiply enormously because you worry about everything.
More often than not, CEOs are conflict-avoidant because their role is to define vision and strategy than it is to get into confrontations with negative and toxic people which they can't stand.
I think I give myself high marks being an entrepreneur and entrepreneuring a big idea about how popular social gaming could be. But I learned a lot of hard lessons on the CEO front... and do not give myself very high marks as a CEO of a large-scale company.
Yes, CEOs are under pressure from all sides, and executives have all sorts of people pushing and pulling at them. But too often, they begin to view and treat their teams, and especially their assistants, as appliances. And a good assistant knows that the last thing their boss wants to hear from them is a personal complaint about anything.
When I became CEO, Puma was bankrupt on paper.
Maybe it's whiner's fatigue, but I'm getting tired of hearing about how hard it is to start a company and be a CEO. It's not that hard.
When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.
I think to some degree one of the strengths of the high tech industry is that people are actually willing to tell you things. When I went to Novell, I didn't know how to be a CEO, so I went in and I called all sorts of CEOs I knew. I called in a favor. I wanted to come by and listen to them tell me what it's like to be a CEO.
The most challenging part of being CEO is communicating to 200,000 people what you want done.
The thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
Building a great team is the lifeblood of any startup, and finding great talent is one of the hardest and costliest tasks any CEO will ever face.
If every company becomes a technology company, business models and transitions are going to occur. From a CEO's perspective, this is going to be the biggest technology transition of all times.
Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.
You have three options [as a CEO]: Either you die, you get fired, or you retire. Two of those options I don’t care for.
Months thereafter he retired.
I learned a lesson that I don't ever want to be a CEO.
I'm on the Business Roundtable, the CEOs of the largest 100-odd companies in the country. Most of these people wanted very much to be the CEO of a large public company but realize that it's not exactly what they had anticipated, for lots of reasons. One is competition has gotten a lot worse, and more global.
As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
I hated being a public company CEO.
The challenge CEOs will face three to five years from now is the same one that they face today. That is engagement. It's hard to keep people engaged in what they are doing. As this generation grows up around social media like Twitter where things are 140 characters, how do you keep them engaged all hours every day at work? How do you keep them focused on the big goals you have?
