Because he drives Lyndon Johnson crazy
It doesn't come naturally to me, being the boss and telling people what I want. I find it very taxing and tiring. I love getting to be way down the line in the decision-making chain.
The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is 'Don't talk about the psychological meltdown.'
If you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, you're worried about quarterly returns.
Yes, CEOs are under pressure from all sides, and executives have all sorts of people pushing and pulling at them. But too often, they begin to view and treat their teams, and especially their assistants, as appliances. And a good assistant knows that the last thing their boss wants to hear from them is a personal complaint about anything.
Certainly businesses the world over are facing greater competitive pressure than ever before, and this leads to executive stress which, in turn, tends to bring out authoritarian tendencies in many bosses. To balance this, we now know a lot more about how we can successfully cope with a situation that is not likely to improve in the near future.
The stock market has an insidious effect on C.E.O.s' moods, because of its impact not just on their companies but on their own bank accounts.
An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
It's stressful when you run a company.
Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.
The higher you go in a company, the less oxygen there is, so supporting intelligent life becomes difficult.
When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.
I don't want to be in boardrooms talking about hiring hairdressers and minivans. I'm not good at it, and I don't like to hire and fire people. I hate that. It's horrible.
You have three options [as a CEO]: Either you die, you get fired, or you retire. Two of those options I don’t care for.
Months thereafter he retired.
We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case.
I think in every country that there is at least one executive who is scared of going crazy.
If you have a life which is adrenaline-charged all week long because you're a powerful CEO, or you have responsibilities and you're committed to the people you look after, it's very difficult on weekends to sit around the garden. So you probably look for something which gives you the same sort of adrenaline buzz.
Almost nothing can make you more miserable than when your company is struggling, and only then do you realize that this is exactly when it's almost impossible for a CEO to quit.
In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.
CEOs are worried they're going to get fired any minute. They're worried about their portfolios.
All of the top managers I have come across during my career and befriend, they suffer as much with the defeats and when things don't go their way late in life as they did early in life.
