Leadership Quotes

Focus on your customers and lead your people as though their lives depend on your success.

Of one thing be certain: if a CEO is enthused about a particularly foolish acquisition, both his internal staff and his outside advisors will come up with whatever projections are needed to justify his stance. Only in fairy tales are emperors told that they are naked.

I'm interested in making a path instead of following a trail, and that's what I want to do in life - in everything I do.

A leader is the wave pushed ahead by the ship.

Great people are those who make others feel that they, too, can become great.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.

You've got to have a problem that you want to solve; a wrong that you want to right.

They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.

If you want to hire great people and have them stay, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.

Strategy is figuring out what not to do.

If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.

Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.

It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.

The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.

Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.

I'm not dismissing the value of higher education; I'm simply saying it comes at the expense of experience.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.