The question I ask myself like almost every day is: 'Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?' Unless I feel like I'm working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I'm not going to feel good about how I'm spending my time. And that's what this company is.
Related Quotes
The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'
In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it and the board tried to fire me and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because I hadn't done a good job communicating. I don't want to blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I didn't, I wasn't thinking about that at the time.
I think companies have a big problem making a big transition, so leaders get replaced.
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
When I was president of the company, I said, 'Okay, I can do this - piece of cake.' Then when you are the CEO, the responsibilities multiply enormously because you worry about everything.
If you fast-forward through the years, there was a period of time when there was too much debate inside the company about the significance of e-commerce, there were leaders who believed it would never be any bigger than the catalog business, there were leaders that believed it would never be profitable.
Popular Authors
