Corporate Strategy Quotes

Paul Otellini, the former CEO of Intel, I worked with while I was still with VMware. I knew Ram Shriram through the tech industry.

Play within the system. Be a decision maker.

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.

When we look at really good high-performing companies abroad, they are always at the back of an extremely high-performing board, and that is something which is very lacking in this country.

I think maybe 50 years ago people and businesses felt like they had to choose between maximizing profits and making customers happy or making employees happy, and I think we're actually living in a special time where everyone's hyperconnected, whether through Twitter or blogs and so on. Information travels so quickly that it's actually possible to have it all, to make customers happy through customer service, to make employees happy through strong company cultures, and have that actually drive growth and profits.

It's easy to say that entrepreneurs will create jobs and big companies will create unemployment, but this is simplistic. The real question is who will innovate.

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

The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation.

I competed with Yahoo for 15-1/2 years, and the one thing I tried to do over the years was desperately try to get a deal with them.

I wrote '#GIRLBOSS' while running a $100 million-plus revenue business.

The goal seems to me at times just to be business first.

Why would I ever want to run Disney? Wouldn't it make more sense just to sell them Pixar and retire?

Abby Johnson has agreed to become Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity, reflecting a further step forward in our leadership succession plan. Abby will retain her role of President, and I will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board.

Customers first, employees second, and shareholders third.

When I graduate, I will either run a division of a company... or I'll get funding for my own company.

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.

You don't think, when you start a company as the founding CEO, that if your venture actually works, you end up with three jobs: founder, CEO, and chair of the board. The first eight years at Bonobos, I have learned a lot about the tension between the first two. It didn't even occur to me that I had the third job until much later.

But in the past, US companies have been able to increase their profits through downsizing in the US, through colonizing other people's resources, and through the increase of globalization.

Every business tries to turn this year's success into next year's greater success. It's hard for me to see why Microsoft is sinful to do this. If it's a sin, then I hope all of Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries are sinners. Someone whose salary is paid by U.S.taxpayers is happy to dramatically weaken the one place where we're winning big?!

Whether you stay private or go public, after all is said and done, a CEO's job is to create lasting shareholder value.

Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.

The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.

I certainly don't understand Fox's decision-making process.

The reason we avoid the word 'synergy' is because people generally claim more synergistic benefits than will come. Yes, it exists, but there are so many false promises.Berkshire is full of synergies - we don't avoid synergies, just claims of synergies.

We need to be focused in corporate America on the long term.