Tan Cheng Bock Quotes

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.

Being a CEO still means sitting across the table from big institutional investors and showing your leadership and having them believe in you.

I hated being a public company CEO.

We're all shareholders. These guys below me, they see the CEO taking it easy, it's their money.

I'm going to continue doing my thing and work my butt off to add value for shareholders and as long as they and the board see fit to keep me in this role, I feel enormously privileged to serve.

By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.

I think most CEOs think their stock is undervalued, probably.

When I took over the family business, it had already been a publicly traded company for 20 years. During one of the first annual meetings I attended, one shareholder stood up and advised me and everyone in attendance that I should resign.

We invited HP executives to participate in the management and in the board. HCL had this concept of corporate officers since inception in 1999. We had a remuneration committee. Now everyone is talking about nomination and remuneration committee. We had this from 1999.

I would rather be responsible and accountable and help to reward the public shareholders going ahead.

Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots.

Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.

If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all.

I'm in a different position than most CEO's. I'm a founder. I'm not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO's are hired by the board.

When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, 'Let's get a better board' can be helpful.

You have to have in mind what you want when you go public. It's not just an end in and of itself. Suddenly, you have investors to satisfy. Investors who want - who demand - a return.

Killing Intel, I, I just had to resign from the Apple Board.

Banks need to have large shareholders on the board that have a direct interest in their performance.

When trouble strikes, which it always does - bad economy, bad quarter, activists, takeover - when trouble strikes, those board members who don't understand or are not committed are not helpful.

I'm willing to have two directors on the DuPont board, me being one of them.

Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa.

The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.

I really believe that all CEO pay should be voted on by shareholders ahead of time. Mine was.