Leadership Quotes

The change that's happening in the world is going to happen. Our choice is to lean in, learn (and) help lead so there are better outcomes for everybody involved.

I think real estate is really core, but you just nailed why I'm still here and loved retail - it's because of the breadth of it. I didn't appreciate how interesting retail was until I got started. You have to have a customer relationship, but you need leadership skills, servant leadership characteristics.

Be a great teammate - you learn how to lead, you learn how to influence by the way you interact with your peers, treat them well, help them, help them do a better job.

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.

We believe in servant leadership. We're looking for altruistic people that can put other people first.

There've been times when leaders have to make decisions, and if you had read my 360 when I first started as a CEO, it would've repetitively said, "You take too long to make decisions, you're participative and that's good, but you need to move faster, be decisive." And as the years went, that stopped being on my 360 because I think I got more confident and more self-aware that sometimes decisions just needed to be made.

We would find ourselves in those moments saying, "I don't know the answer either, but you own the decision and tomorrow tell us what you decided." And so that quality decision making, moving fast was so different.

The best leaders lead through influence and collaboration, regardless of their title.

When I joined Walmart, I just had a team mindset, but I look back on it now, and I realize some of those early jobs I had, I was trying to help other people and rally the team. It ended up people started looking at me as a leader.

Helping other people develops your leadership skills, and people start to see you as a natural leader.

As chairman, I commit to keeping Business Roundtable CEOs at the forefront of constructive public policy debates as we pursue an agenda of greater growth and opportunity for all Americans.

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.

That's one of the best things about my job: I get to tell the world about the innovative and meaningful things our people are doing every day.

You have a meeting, you hear about the strategy and then you think, "Yeah, we've got to do this." And then you go home that night, you're about to go to sleep, and you think, "I can't do that." And then you get up the next morning and go back through it, and we just iterate to a point where you finally have to make a decision and go for it.

You can't push a rope, but you can pull it. In other words, sometimes you just can't lead from behind. You can't muscle or push things along. As a leader during transformation, you have to be out in front - show that you want to learn, be curious, introduce new ideas, ask questions.

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

Lenience will operate with greater force, in some instances than rigor. It is therefore my first wish to have all of my conduct distinguished by it.

My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty . . . it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.

Leadership is not only having a vision, but also having the courage, the discipline, and the resources to get you there.

A people unused to restraint must be led, they will not be drove.