Frans van Houten Quotes

In business, sometimes you have to change the CEO in order to change the direction of the company.

When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

Harman had great brands, but the processes were falling apart.

Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change.

And ours is a business that requires discipline and focus.

Lot of companies are looking for advisory work on business strategy, restructuring work.

Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business.

Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

I have spent my career making a difference with underperforming assets.

The key to Operations at Wal-Mart is their ability to maintain the highest standards while at the same time getting things done with lockstep execution.

Our entire team is focused on managing this company for value - fixing or eliminating those operations that lessen value and expanding or adding those that enhance value.

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

The real underlying value comes if you can put a company back into a running state and it becomes a successful viable entity if it continues to repay loans.

When a change in how some element of one's business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off.

Our focus is to see that we are growing faster than the industry and, whichever product we launch, we do better than competition. We try and manage our operations better than competition. Essentially, we try to be better than what we were the previous year.

Too many people who come in as CEO of a poorly performing company assume that none of the incumbent executives are worth retaining. That's not always the case. Sometimes the talent is there, but it's not being led well.

CIOs have earned a strategic seat at the table, but now they've got to hold that seat - and the only way they can do that is to converse in the language of business value and business benefits and business outcomes that all align perfectly with the strategic agenda of the company.

I'm committed to structural changes.

For organisations, flexibility is a must to cope with fluctuations in demand and remain competitive, and people must be able to develop adaptable attitudes to quickly embrace evolving business conditions, new business opportunities, and shifting strategies.

As CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, we used a concept called 'search and reapply,' which meant that if we found better ways of doing something, then we would do it.

There's always an opportunity with crisis. Just as it forces an individual to look inside himself, it forces a company to reexamine its policies and practices.

Sometimes, you have a hunch and then you find numbers that substantiate that, it makes either the staff or the players say, 'OK, let's fix that.'

One of the things that is most difficult for a manager is reversing bad results and keeping going.

While looking ahead, we know challenges remain, but we are encouraged by the strategies we have in place to improve our operational efficiencies and performance.