B. C. Forbes Quotes

Stay externally focused - on your customers - and focus internally when you have to hire.

Our company has to be a company that enables its people.

We would rather have our employees running our business.

It doesn't do much good to have a quality image, whether it's with the facility or whether it's with the merchandise, if you don't have real quality people taking care of your customers.

As a CEO, you get sucked into dealing with all the tasks of being a CEO. There's a big meeting, a big discussion, and you get into all the big issues, which is your job. But what CEOs often lose sight of is that it's all about the people who work for you. For every 1,000 decisions, 999 were being made when I was not in the room.

Building human-centered organizations doesn't imply a return to the paternalistic, corporate welfare practices of the 19th century. Most of us don't want to be nannied.

Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.

Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that - it's hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate 'em.

If you believe, as I do, that your employees truly are your most valuable asset, you will do whatever you can to help them do their jobs as well as possible.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

The most important thing executives can do is send a very clear message to their employees that they care about each person's overall wellbeing and that they want to be a part of helping it improve over time.

Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You'd be amazed how many companies don't listen to their customers.

We have a training period; we have certain guidelines and structure. You can't hire talented people and stifle them. That's not the way it works anymore.

I don't believe very much in corporate offices. I believe in leaders who are with their customers and their people.

Internal marketing is probably much more important than external marketing. That's even more true today than it's ever been.

At Facebook, we try to be a strengths-based organization, which means we try to make jobs fit around people rather than make people fit around jobs. We focus on what people's natural strengths are and spend our management time trying to find ways for them to use those strengths every day.

Chick-fil-A is what it is today because of its people, purpose and product.

We're very much in the people business in that there are two important groups you have to work with: customers and employees.

The first day, week and month of an employee's experience carries a lasting impression.

Most people in an organization try very hard to do what the leadership wants them to do. That places a tremendous responsibility on leaders.

We think that many companies view Coursera as a quality, convenient, inexpensive way to continue employee development. Is there a contract with a company that might make sense? I don't have an answer to that yet.

About every other week, I sit down with all of our new Zynga hires and I talk to them for about 90 minutes, have an open Q&A. There is no formal presentation. I talk about our values, where they came from and why they are so important, and I ask them to challenge those values.

If your employees are disengaged, and they don't take care of your customers, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is - your customers will still go somewhere else.

As a leader, you absolutely must expend your energy engaging your frontline employees so that they will take care of customers, who will tell stories about how great your company is to other people, who will become new customers.

I work with CEOs and their executive teams... and very few of these people are really indifferent about their employees or their customers.