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Financial Quotes
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Executives Quotes

  • "When I’ve had a rough day, before I go to sleep I ask myself if there’s anything more I can do right now. If there isn’t, I sleep sound."
    L. L. Colbert (1905–1995), US chairman of Chrysler Corporation
    Source: Newsweek (1955)
  • "Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business."
    Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), French philosopher
    Source: Cool Memories (1987)
  • "Nobody should be chief executive officer of anything for more than five or six years. By then he's stale, bored, and utterly dependent upon his own clichés."
    Robert Townsend (1920–1998), US business executive and author
    Source: Up the Organization (1970)
  • "Regarded as a means, the businessman is tolerable. Regarded as an end, he is not so satisfactory."
    John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), British economist
    Source: Essays in Persuasion (1978)
  • "One lesson a man learns from Harvard Business School is that an executive is only as good as his health."
    Jeffrey, Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare (1940–), British novelist and politician
    Source: Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976)
  • "Executive: A man who can make quick decisions and is sometimes right."
    Frank McKinney Hubbard (1868–1930), US humorist
    Source: The Roycroft Dictionary (1923)
  • "I always say to executives that they should go and see King Lear, because they'll be out there one day, wandering on the heath without a company car."
    Charles Handy (1932–), Irish business executive and author
    Source: Interview, The Times (London) (April 12, 1989)
  • "Their problem is that they play a lot of golf, which is right up there with heroin abuse as a killer of our nation's productivity. The only difference is that golf is more expensive."
    Dave Barry (1947–), US humorist
    Referring to executives.
    Source: Interview, Fortune (July 7, 1997)
  • "A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 a.m. and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 p.m. to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch."
    Fred Allen (1894–1956), US comedian and satirist
    Source: Treadmill to Oblivion (1954)
  • "The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market reward for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."
    J. K. Galbraith (1908–2006), US economist and diplomat
    Source: Annals of an Abiding Liberal (1979)
  • "Successful executives are great askers."
    Warren Bennis (1925–), US educator and writer
    Source: Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology (cowritten with Jagdish Parikh and Ronnie Lessem, 1994)
  • "The trouble with corporate America is that too many people with too much power live in a box (their home), travel the same road every day to another box (their office)."
    Faith Popcorn (1947–), US trend expert and founder of BrainReserve
    Source: The Popcorn Report (1991)
  • "There is nothing more short term than a 60-year-old CEO holding a fistful of share options."
    Gary Hamel (1954–), US academic, business writer, and consultant
    Source: Competing for the Future (cowritten with C. K. Prahalad, 1994)
  • "Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa."
    T. Boone Pickens (1928–), US oil company executive and financier
    Source: Harvard Business Review (May–June 1986)
  • "From now on, choosing my successor is the most important decision I'll make. It occupies a considerable amount of thought almost every day."
    Jack Welch (1935–), US former chairman and CEO of General Electric
    Source: Quoted in The New GE (Robert Slater, 1993)
  • "An overburdened, stretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people."
    Jack Welch (1935–), US former chairman and CEO of General Electric
    Source: “Quotes of the Year,” Financial Times (London) (December 30, 1989)
  • "The heroic role of the captain of industry is that of a deliverer from an excess of business management. It is a casting out of businessmen by the chief of businessmen."
    Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), US economist and social scientist
    Source: The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904)
  • "The chief executive … like a juggler keeps a number of projects in the air: periodically one comes down, is given a new burst of energy, and is sent back into orbit."
    Henry Mintzberg (1939–), Canadian academic and management theorist
    Source: “The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact,” Harvard Business Review (July–August 1975)
  • "The biggest change in the workplace of the future will be the widespread realization that having one idiot boss is a much higher risk than having many idiot clients."
    Scott Adams (1957–), US cartoonist and humorist
    Source: The Dilbert Principle (1996)
  • "I can tell more about how someone is likely to react in a business situation from one round of golf than I can from a hundred hours of meetings."
    Mark McCormack (1930–2003), US entrepreneur, founder and CEO of International Management Group
    Source: What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School (1984)
  • "Some years back, a CEO friend of mine—in jest, it must be said—described the pathology of many big deals … With an impish look, he simply said: Aw, fellas, all the other kids have one."
    Warren Buffett (1930–), US entrepreneur and financier
    Source: Chairman's letter to shareholders (March 7, 1995)
  • "You can know a person by the kind of desk he keeps … If the president of a company has a clean desk … then it must be the executive vice president who is doing all the work."
    Harold S. Geneen (1910–1997), US telecommunications entrepreneur and CEO of ITT
    Source: Managing (cowritten with Alvin Moscow, 1984)
  • "The nature of the job is you only hear problems—I guess that's what a CEO's job is."
    William Clay Ford, Jr (1957–), US business executive
    Source: Interview, Fortune (November 2002)
  • "Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work."
    John G. Pollard (1871–1937), US politician
    Source: Attributed

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