Lord Robertson Quotes

You can't delegate turning a company around.

When I first came to Playboy, I thought I would go on and do something else in a few years. But when the company got into trouble with political and regulatory challenges, I felt that I could really lead the turn around.

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.

While Safeco's turnaround is one of the greatest things I have ever participated in, the heart-wrenching decisions to let people go will stay with me forever.

Any dope with a checkbook can buy a company. It's what you do afterward that matters.

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

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.

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.

You look at Governor Romney's record in the private sector, he helped turn businesses around. Certainly a decade ago he took what would have been an international disaster with the U.S. Olympics, and turned it around for America and made us great again with the Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Despite PAL's troubles in the late 1990s, we were fortunate to have steered the company to clearer skies.

I wish the company and its associates all the best as Sears Holdings continues on its transformation.

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

On 'Bar Rescue,' failure is not an option. I have to try to turn the business around.

The progress we have made in a short amount of time gives me confidence we're making the right moves to turn around our business and reposition McDonald's as a modern, progressive burger company.

When I came into the CEO office, I basically changed the entire management team. We knew that we had to change the company, so we needed a new set of leaders.

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.

Obviously I've got a great team of people within the company. You can't operate all by yourself. We have a good board of directors and a big bench, and they can make decisions if I'm not around.

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.

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.'

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 spent most of my career operating businesses and fixing businesses, not staring at a Bloomberg screen.

There was a point in time when I was in dire need of changing the way the model agency was working.

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

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.