Hasso Plattner Quotes

My business is the analytical framework.

You can't make good decisions without knowing the business.

Today, I think a CFO needs to be more of an operating CFO: someone who's using the financial data and the data of the company to help drive strategy, the allocation of capital, and the management of risks.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.

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.

You don't need Math to do business reporting. Business is all about choices that consumers make.

You generally hear that what a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him, but in business what a man doesn't know does hurt.

Over the time that I followed Warren Buffett, one CFO told me, it's very important to pay attention not only to what Warren Buffett says and what he actually does - often there are subtle differences between the two.

I was always fascinated by the decision-making process and the managerial process and just business in general.

We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me.

The essence of good business is knowing when to step on a train and when to step off.

You take the noise and put it in data information knowledge, and you get insight from that knowledge. How to execute the trade, the timing, sizing, long, short, and then you risk manage it.

I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.

This is a business. Be smart. Choose wisely.

A lot of what I do is running businesses rather than buying stocks. My worst decision is probably when I know I have the wrong chief executive running the business, and I keep on waiting to make the difficult decision of replacing him.

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

How can you be on top of the things you do? I think when you are involved in a business, first of all you need to know the business. After that you know the business, you can - the numbers tell you what is happening. You can read with the numbers.

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.

I come from Wall Street, and you'll never see me do a PowerPoint because I'm all about Excel spreadsheets. If it's not in the numbers, I don't care how strategic it is; it doesn't play out.

In the finance world, we used to spend all of our time looking backwards, reporting on what happened. Can I book it? What are the numbers? Now it's about looking into the future. It's about planning and integration. The role of finance is now that of a partner in the business.

If you look at Citadel today, that's really - the founding principle of the firm is a real pursuit of talent, a pursuit of people who have a passion for finance, and a pursuit of individuals who make good decisions day in and day out.

The biggest challenge is adding the bureaucracy it takes to run the company without becoming fat, lazy, inflexible - bureaucratic.

There is still too much pressure on short-termism in terms of the drivers of success.