Pierre Nanterme Quotes

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.

My definition of an executive's job is brief and to the point. It is simply this: Getting things done through other people.

Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.

As a first-time CEO, I wasn't sure if I would scale to run IronPort long-term. But I wanted a legitimate shot at it.

A great man is one who deliberately causes something important to a happen, the probability of which seemed low before he took up the task. A great man is a man who gives history a turn which it could scarcely have taken without him. They give history a twist which nobody would have predicted. Great men leave permanent effects.

When you empower people you sign up for a life of uncertainty and change.

To be a leader is to be awake and dissatisfied at all times. Leadership is action. Leadership is influence

Governing is about making tough decisions, but it's also about figuring out a better way to do things.

Our next CEO needs to thrive in a highly dynamic environment, to be capable of accelerating what is working very well for Cisco and disrupting what needs to change.

Dad was an outstanding leader. He'd bring in top thinkers from a wide array of fields - how to fix the Detroit schools, for example. I watched him in these meetings. He listened and probed.

Leaders are not dogmatic. They are principled and know that change is never easy, but when it's necessary, they must lead.

Leadership is more than just managing economic reforms. Leadership means giving broad direction, take up challenges which other people cannot do.

The thing I'm most proud of in my career was to be able to help two organizations go someplace that they've never been before. Not many people get that opportunity to do it with one.

I am and always will be a catalyst for change.

Shaping the future is what drives me. Since I left politics, I'm very much interested in emerging markets.

The world is starving for original and decisive leadership.

I'm very much a leader in a lot of the work that I do or that I've done in my career.

I would say a good leader brings results. A great leader writes a new story, it's different. Obviously a new story has to incorporate a lot of results. But a story is a chapter in the life of a company that people want to write and want to remember.

You have to be damn certain you're putting something better in its place.

If there's one thing that's certain in business, it's uncertainty.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

I'm a visionary. I'm not a maintenance person.

In any business, you have to evolve.