Company Quotes

The two most important things in any company do not appear in its balance sheet: its reputation and its people.

In the Ford Motor Company we emphasize service equally with sales.

Combating climate change is absolutely critical to the future of our company,Green Cooler customers, consumers-and our world. I believe all of us need to take action now. PepsiCo has already taken actions in our operations and throughout our supply chain to 'future- proof' our company-all of which deliver real cost savings, mitigate risk, protect our license to operate, and create resilience in our supply chain.

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.

I think innovation as a discipline needs to go back and get rethought and revived. There are so many models to talk about innovation, there are so many typologies of innovation, and you have to find a good innovation metric that truly captures the innovation performance of a company.

By 1994, PepsiCo was the fifteenth-biggest US company, with annual revenue of $25 billion. It sold drinks and food in more than 150 countries and employed 450,000 people.

If you don't give people a chance to fail... you won't innovate... if you wanna be an innovative company allow people to make mistakes.

Today, Walmart employs about 2.1 million associates. The vast majority of our management team started as an hourly, just like I did. If you walked around here, not just here in Arkansas, but around our company, you would find a lot of people with more than 20 years of service, and you'd find a lot of people who've joined the company to climb up the ladder and create opportunities for themselves.

As I look across our company, we have everything from store associates to supply chain associates. Of the 2.1 million people (globally), something less than 75,000 of them are home office jobs. All the other ones are working in a store, a club, a distribution center. And I think those jobs change more gradually. We are still going to want to serve customers and members with people. The change as it relates to the home office jobs probably happens faster.

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.

The stores are an asset, and they have a great assortment in them and they're close to people. Being within 10 miles of 90% of America is a huge advantage, especially with fresh food at a good price. But we must also, if you think long-term and you think about what the company wants to accomplish, you must have a big and important first-party e-commerce business, and you must have a marketplace, and the things that go along with the marketplace.

So, what I think, sometimes a pure tech company can underestimate is the importance of culture, the importance of a purpose.

People need a "Why?". I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek, people need to know why they're doing what they're doing, me included, and they want to work at a company with values and a culture that matches those values and I think that those things matter even in a pure tech company.

If we were with a bunch of Walmart associates right now, we could say, 'The only thing that's constant in our company other than our purpose and values is..,' and they would respond, 'Change.'"

The thing that's been consistent is that this is a team sport and nothing happens through the work of just an individual. We all do this together and it doesn't matter whether you're going to do a startup or you're at a big company, that's going to be the case. And what sport taught me was the importance of that and how to treat a teammate, and how to work together.

If you want to think of a company as a system, design the system to benefit all. So how can you raise wages, increase training, and reduce carbon, and provide low-prices? We believe that it's possible to deliver, and I find a lot of other likeminded CEOs, as it relates to thinking that way.

Representing a company with the largest and one of the most diverse groups of associates in the U.S., and an even more diverse customer base of tens of millions of customers, we believe we should stay engaged to try to influence decisions in a positive way and help bring people together.

We have a long heritage as a company of serving responsible hunters and sportsmen and women, and we're going to continue doing so.

We need to learn how to become a digital enterprise, but we understand that we're a company made up of 2.2 million associates, and that human interaction in the future will matter.

There just aren't that many opportunities in the world that are that big, and for a company like Walmart that needs to move the needle in a big way, you have to take some big bets, but if you're going to take that much risk, the reward has to match up.