LEADERSHIP

The best thing I ever did was hire people smarter than me and get out of their way.

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.

It is fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

Culture compounds just like capital. Good culture builds value over decades. Bad culture destroys it faster than any financial mistake.

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

The hardest part about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability.

We will not shy away from the hard things. If we work together, and put the customer first, I'm confident we'll unlock the potential of this great company.

The hard part isn't building the product. The hard part is building a company that continuously builds great products.

I got the CEO thing mostly wrong for the first few years. Turns out, managing people is nothing like managing code.

I would do anything short of an illegal act to keep this company going.

Growth is oxygen. Without growth, you are slowly asphyxiating.

Mediocrity is a disease. And it's a communicable disease. Mediocre people hire mediocre people. Urgency is a muscle — exercise it.

I made decisions that were not in the best interest of the company. I own that.

Every new employee at DoorDash does a delivery shift. Including engineers. Including me. You can't build for Dashers if you've never been one.

In March 2020, we went from hiring mode to war mode. We onboarded 300,000 shoppers in 30 days. I didn't sleep for a week.

I studied Marxist philosophy under Habermas in Frankfurt. Now I build tools for the Pentagon. Life is full of plot twists.

Laying off half your team is the hardest thing a founder can do. We built too fast for a market that moved too fast. The technology is right. The timing was too hot.

The best investment I ever made was investing in people — finding talented people and giving them the opportunity to prove themselves.

Management is everything. I'd rather have an okay business with great management than a great business with okay management.

Every company needs a purpose beyond profit. Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential.

We have to constantly be innovating or we'll become irrelevant. And irrelevance is the one thing I truly fear.

To be creative, you need a certain freedom. My role is to create the conditions in which creativity can flourish — and then get out of the way.

In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

The most important thing that I learned is that you have to be yourself. There is no formula. There's no right way to do it. You have to figure out what is authentic for you.

Board members who are too worried about the relationship to tell a founder they're wrong are not helping that founder. They're helping themselves feel comfortable.

The best board members are the ones who've actually run something. They know what it feels like when it's 2am and you don't know the answer.

The role of the CEO shifts dramatically as the company scales. What made you successful at 10 people will actively hurt you at 500.

The number one job of a CEO is to not run out of money. The number two job is to not run out of talent.

I resigned from Reddit's board so that a Black candidate could fill my seat. It's the least I could do. My wife is Black, my daughter is Black, and I've been educated by so many powerful Black voices.

I had to choose between my vision and my company. I chose my company.

We hired too fast. I own that. When money is coming in fast, discipline is harder to maintain. That's on me.

On January 25, 2020, I read a medical paper about a new virus in Wuhan. By January 27, we had started designing the vaccine. There was no committee meeting. I just told my team: this is it.

People ask if I'm a CEO or a scientist. I say: what is a CEO of a science company if not a scientist? The lab coat is the leadership.

We were 90 days from bankruptcy. We cut 4,000 jobs. We renegotiated $3.5 billion in debt. And then we posted our first profitable quarter. Survival is not a strategy — but sometimes it's all you've got.

I don't come from chip design. I come from building companies. The chip designers told me a wafer-scale chip was impossible. I asked why. Nobody had a good answer.

I got fired from my own company. Twice. The board said I couldn't scale. Maybe they were right. But the soul of the company — that was mine.

When I became CEO, people said Etsy was a charity pretending to be a company. We proved you can have values and margins. They're not mutually exclusive.

We shut down on a Tuesday. 400 people lost their jobs. I'd moved my family from Australia to San Francisco for this. It was the worst day of my life.

I stepped down as CEO because I was burned out. Completely. I'd been running at full speed for six years. The company was healthy. I wasn't. That's a bad combination.

I don't do interviews. I don't appear in public. There are almost no photos of me on the internet. I built a $100 billion company and nobody knows what I look like. That's intentional.

I left Twitter as COO to run SoFi. People thought I was crazy. But SoFi had something Twitter didn't — a clear path to becoming a bank. An actual bank. With a charter and everything.

I was fired as CEO two years before the bankruptcy. The board replaced me with someone who was supposed to fix the cost structure. Nobody could fix a cost structure when your competitor's costs are falling 30% a year.

I resigned as CEO. The board and I disagreed on the path forward. I believed in open source. They believed in revenue. Both are valid. They just point in different directions.

Going public was not the finish line. It was permission to think in decades instead of quarters.

I became the youngest female CEO to run a company valued at over a billion dollars in Asia. And then I became one of the youngest to lose it all. Both titles are equally mine.

We grew to 400 employees and then ran out of money overnight. I mean literally overnight. One day we were operating, the next day I had to tell 400 people they no longer had jobs.

I still drive to construction sites. I still look at floor plans. At 80 years old, I still care whether the kitchen layout makes sense. That is the difference between a developer and a financier.

We laid off over 2,500 people. That was the hardest thing I have ever done. I hired too many people too fast during the boom. That is my responsibility and I own it completely.

Customers first, employees second, shareholders third. If your customers are happy, your employees are happy, the shareholders will be happy. Do it the other way and nobody is happy.

The worst quality of a businessperson is to be a nice, good person. You need to be tough and make difficult decisions. Nice people finish last in business — decisive people finish first.

I prefer sending emails at 3 AM about product bugs to giving keynote speeches. The product is the speech.

I always tell new employees: don't think of this as a job. Think of it as a chance to solve a problem that affects a billion people. If that doesn't motivate you, this isn't the right place.

I don't think being CEO is that interesting. I would rather explore new technologies and read science fiction. Running a company is mostly meetings.

Everyone at Fast Retailing must read Peter Drucker. If you don't understand management as a discipline, you have no right to manage anyone.

When Mugabe's government tried to shut me down, my employees kept showing up to work every morning. That told me everything I needed to know about the business — and about the people.

I got fired by my own board and rehired 48 hours later. Startups are weird.

David Bonderman was the dealmaker. I was the builder. Every great firm needs both.

Owning an NBA team teaches you something PE never does: 20,000 people show up every night to tell you whether your investment is working.

We laid off 1,500 people. It was the hardest decision of my life. But a company that does not survive cannot help any students at all.

I run NVIDIA like we are 30 days from going out of business. That paranoia has served us well for 30 years.

People said I could not replace Steve. They were right. I did not try to. I built something different.

Empathy is the hardest skill in business and the most important. You cannot innovate for people you do not understand.

We went from know-it-all to learn-it-all. That single cultural shift is what saved Microsoft.

We laid off thousands of people. It was brutal. But a company that runs out of money helps nobody.

I still code. The day a CEO stops understanding the product is the day the product starts dying.

I laid off 20% of the company because I was wrong about the e-commerce acceleration lasting. I take full responsibility.

I co-founded Twitter and Square at the same time. People said you cannot run two companies. I said watch me. They were partially right.

When we closed the Blackstone deal, I gave every employee $10,000 and two first-class plane tickets. If you win, everyone should win.

In this company we do not fire people. We graduate them.

The signature of a good leader is not how many followers you have but how many leaders you create.

I still deliver food sometimes. You cannot run a delivery company if you have never delivered anything.

I knew IBM had to transform. Revenue declined for 22 quarters. Everyone saw the problem. The challenge was having the courage to fix it while running the company.

Good power is the power that lifts others up. It is the only kind worth having.

Growth and comfort do not coexist. You have to choose one.

If you are not willing to be the villain in someone else's story you cannot be the hero in your own.

I know the Zoom call was handled badly. I know. But the company was dying and I had to act.

I wrote letters to the parents of my direct reports thanking them for raising such wonderful children. Not one CEO I know does this.

Elon builds the rockets. I build the business that pays for them.

I burned out earlier in my career. That experience taught me that sustainable performance matters more than heroic sprints.

Growth and transformation do not happen in parallel. You have to break things to rebuild them better.

I am the first woman to run a major Wall Street bank. I would rather be remembered as the best CEO than the first female one.

A billion users chose Instagram. Zuckerberg chose what Instagram would become. Those are different choices.

Business is the greatest platform for change. CEOs who think their only job is shareholder returns are dinosaurs.

Jamie Dimon calls me one of the most talented executives in JPMorgan history. I call that motivation to keep proving it.

I am the first Black woman to chair an S&P 500 board. I would rather be remembered as the best chair, not the first Black one.

I have four words for you: I. Love. This. Company.

If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.

In motivating people, you've got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example — and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.

I don't believe in taking right decisions. I take decisions and then make them right.

Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.

Diverse teams make better financial decisions. This isn't a belief — it's what the data shows.

In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.

Kindness is not weakness. It's actually the ultimate strength in business.

We just want to have great people working for us.

Transparency and accountability are not optional. They are the foundation of good governance.

The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.

Steve Jobs told me the key to success is hiring people smarter than you and then getting out of their way.

Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality in a good leader.

Optimism is a very important part of leadership. People don't want to follow a pessimist.

The CEO's job is capital allocation. Everything else can be delegated.

I didn't come to Uber to maintain the status quo. I came to build a real business.

The best leaders are the ones who can admit mistakes. Uber had to earn back trust, and that started with honesty.

Stepping down as CEO was the hardest decision of my life. Sometimes the best thing for the company isn't you.

Leadership is about solving problems that other people are afraid to touch.

The biggest risk is being unwilling to take any risk at all.

The hardest part of building a company is not building the product. It's building the team.

It's always Day 1. The moment you think it's Day 2, you're in trouble.

I don't follow trends. I set them. That applies to football and business.

Messi changed everything. One signing turned a struggling franchise into the most valuable team in MLS.

The best creative directors need freedom to take risks. Our job is to protect that freedom.

A luxury brand is only as strong as its creative director. Choose wisely.

My grandfather founded Toyota. My job is to make sure it's here for another 100 years.

Kindness and empathy in evaluating founders produces better results than tough-guy interrogation.

In times of adversity and change, we really discover who we are and what we're made of.

Consensus is the enemy of speed. If everyone agrees, you're probably not moving fast enough.

Most companies don't have a strategy problem. They have an execution problem. They know what to do. They just don't do it fast enough.

Increase the tempo. Increase the standards. Narrow the focus. That's how you turn a company around.

The currency of leadership is transparency.

I write code every week. I'm a CTO. That's what CTOs should do.

Hollywood runs on fear. That's why I run Hollywood.

The prize is $5 million plus $200,000 a year for life. Some years, nobody qualifies. That tells you everything about African governance.

Good governance is not charity. It's the foundation of everything — business, health, education, security. Without it, nothing works.

Carrying the expectations of a billion people teaches you pressure management better than any MBA ever could.

Owning a baseball team taught me that the skills that make you a great player don't necessarily make you a great executive.

I took a $1 salary because I wanted to prove that a CEO can lead from purpose, not from a paycheck.

The ignition switch recall was the worst moment of my career. But it taught me that transparency is the only policy that works in a crisis.

I don't see myself as the first female CEO of a major automaker. I see myself as the CEO of General Motors. Period.

I stepped down because the company needed a different kind of leader for the next phase. That takes self-awareness.

I made mistakes. Big ones. Running a company for 16 years means you will. The question is whether you learn faster than the damage compounds.

Every leader gets tested. 9/11 was my test on day four. I learned more in that first week than in the previous decade.

Running a great company is about 70% leadership and 30% strategy. Get the people wrong and strategy doesn't matter.

I am not trying to win a popularity contest. I am trying to run a business. Those are different objectives.

No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

Fun is a stimulus to human creativity.

The business of business is people — yesterday, today, and forever.

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy.

Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.

The best teammates I've had in business are the same as in basketball — people who tell you the truth, not what you want to hear.

An empire was not built by sitting in a corner office. It was built on the factory floor.

Being a woman managing partner at a top VC firm in 2022 shouldn’t be news. The fact that it is tells you everything about the industry.

Our corporate sector needs coders, programmers, data scientists, and we need to help provide this kind of qualified labor force.

Business is in many respects much simpler than politics

Please, respect our presence around this table. I do not have to be here. I have two jets packed at the airport. My mates are in the Bahamas.

The best managers are not the ones who have all the answers. They are the ones who ask the best questions.

The companies that win in the next decade will be the ones that figure out how to unlock the potential of every single employee, not just the top performers.

If your people are not growing, your company is not growing. It is that simple.

People analytics should empower employees, not surveil them. The moment your team feels watched instead of supported, you have lost.

The best companies are run by owners, not by managers. When people own equity, they think differently about every decision.

Meritocracy is not comfortable. The best people thrive and the rest move on. That is how you build a great organization.

Give equity to your best people and they will build the company for you. It is the cheapest and most powerful incentive ever invented.

You do not need to be loud to be powerful.

I go to the stores because that is where the truth is. Not in the boardroom.

If the board won't create value for shareholders, someone else will.

COVID destroyed our revenue overnight. Zero classes. Zero bookings. We laid off more than half the company. It was the worst day of my career.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

I don't believe in a general manager system. I want to make the final decisions.

Surround yourself with people smarter than you and get out of their way.

Our number one priority is company culture. Our whole belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff will just happen naturally.

I took over at twenty-eight because life did not give me a choice. You grow up fast when you have to.

Being pregnant at my IPO was not a statement. It was just Tuesday.

I studied pharmacy, not finance. Business is about understanding what people need. That is the same skill whether you are in a laboratory or a boardroom.

A business is only as strong as its capacity to serve the people around it. If you lose sight of that, you lose the business.

I resigned to protect Lebanon. Sometimes the most powerful statement is stepping back.

Relative strength separates the leaders from the laggers. Buy the strongest stocks in a bull market. Short the weakest stocks in a bear market.

My father always said: take care of your customers, take care of your employees, and the business will take care of itself.

My father built something extraordinary. My job is to make sure it continues to flourish, to adapt to a changing world, and to stand for the same values he stood for.

After 22 years, the time is right for new leadership. Atlassian is ready for the next chapter.

Sergio Marchionne was one of the greatest managers I have ever seen at work. He had a unique gift for making complex things simple and for getting the best out of people.

A leader's job is not to stand at the top of the pyramid. It is to be the foundation beneath everyone else.

The Lakers are bigger than any one player or coach. We have to protect the brand while still taking risks.

I did not get here by being passive. I got here by making the hard calls.

When you are in business, you have to hold yourself accountable. That goes for the Cleveland Browns, and it went for Pilot Flying J. We learned hard lessons.

We are going to be a model sports franchise. We are going to win — and we are going to win with class.

I learned more from being on the bench at Michigan State than I ever learned from being on the court. You watch everything. You learn how teams actually work.

Tom Izzo taught me that culture is not a poster on the wall. It is the behavior you tolerate and the behavior you reward. That is it.

We need to find people who are hungry, who believe they can win, and who are going to bring that energy every single day. That is what we are looking for.

I grew up understanding the value of hard work. I did not grow up in wealth. That shaped how I think about every dollar the company spends.

The CFO is the co-pilot of the business. You have to understand every part of how the company works, not just the numbers.

You do not need to be perfect to be a great leader. You need to know what you do not know, hire people who fill the gaps, and keep moving.

At Facebook I learned that engineering culture is the product. If your engineers are exceptional, the decisions they make will be exceptional too.

The hardest part of any pivot is convincing your team that the old version of the company is not the same as giving up.

The best CEOs I know are the ones who can change their minds when the facts change.

I had a reading disability. My teachers told me I'd never succeed in business. That turned out to be excellent motivation.

I was f***ing fired. Yes, the board could have been more professional about how they fired me.

I give you the ball, I tell you the goal, and I get out of your way.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I had one rule: don't let it stop you.

If you can't explain what your company does in two sentences, you've got a real problem.

The most dangerous thing in business is to be right for the wrong reasons — or to win the battle and lose the war.

A leader who is afraid of failure will not take bold action. Bold action is what separates transformational leaders from managers.

We didn't settle with the SEC early because we believed we were right. Walking away from that fight would have set a terrible precedent for the entire crypto industry.

Challenges make us stronger. My husband faced many. My sons face many. We do not step back — we step forward.

A family that stays together builds together. Without trust among the members, no empire can survive.

Rio Tinto is a company with a strong sense of values. When we fall short of those values, we acknowledge it, learn from it, and improve.

A PhD in chemistry taught me one thing above all: be rigorous about what you actually know versus what you assume. I try to apply that every day.

We want to be the most admired mining company. Not the most profitable at any cost. The most admired — which means doing it right.

Safety is not a number you hit. It is a culture you build. If people are not going home safely, nothing else we do matters.

We want to be the mining company the world needs to exist. Not just the one it currently tolerates.

Being a good company and a profitable company are not mutually exclusive — and frankly, in mining today, being a good company is the only way to remain profitable.

You cannot manage what you don't understand. Go underground. Walk the conveyor belts. Understand what people are actually doing before you redesign it.

We made some extremely hard decisions in 2015 and 2016. But they were the right decisions. Not the comfortable ones — the right ones.

Every dollar of cost reduction is permanent. Every dollar of revenue is temporary. Never forget which one you control.

Jim Sinegal will run this better than I did. I knew that when I hired him.

The principles my father established — respect for the individual, service to the customer, striving for excellence, acting with integrity — those aren't just posters on the wall. They have to be lived every day.

Dad built this company on the idea that if you take care of your associates and customers, everything else takes care of itself.

Arvest was built on the same principles my father built Walmart on — serve your customers, treat your associates well, and stay focused on the basics.

My father believed in the people of Heineken as much as he believed in the beer. That is the legacy we are working to honour.

Meritocracy means that the best people rise, regardless of where they came from. That is the culture we try to build everywhere we operate.

Leadership in a crisis means making decisions with incomplete information. You cannot wait for perfect data.

The best restructuring is the one where everybody gives a little and everybody gets something.

The key to being successful in business is trust, you have to trust the people you work with.

First and foremost the people in your business have to be extremely competent at what they do.

On behalf of the 600 companies that have already pledged, I would like to sincerely thank the jury for elevating Working with Cancer to another level of global awareness.

The priority at this stage is to focus on the transformation of the group, because this is the only way 80,000 people will progress.

You worked with the sense that MIDROC is yours.

You have to be very humble if you want to be an entrepreneur. Know what you know, know what you don't know, and surround yourself with people that support your strengths and your weaknesses.

For a while I had shame about asking questions, and I think if I had given myself permission to be ignorant and ask questions, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes.

It's much better to go into a new business with men who are extremely smart but don't know a damn thing about it. There are no prejudices that way. We start with a clean slate and build everything from the foundation.

There is no leadership without risk-taking, and therefore without the right to make mistakes.

Today, not only have I lost a friend, but we have all lost an extraordinary creative mind to whom I gave carte blanche in the early 1980s to reinvent the brand.

We have success and sometimes we have failure. And sometimes if I see no failure, I wonder if we didn't push it enough.

Much of an entrepreneur's success depends on the team he builds. You always have to hire people who are smarter than you.

It is only when you are calm in a crisis can you find a solution.

Leading by influence is often more powerful than leading by authority.

You learn a lot of things more through adversity than you do through success.

As you grow, the hardest thing is to keep the bureaucracy away and keep the innovation alive.

You can be an entrepreneur and an executive.

At the end of the day, we are all product companies. We all solve a problem. And if you don't understand your product, it's very hard to build a great business around it.

We're deeply sorry for the impact that we've caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our company.

I was really naive in the world of trusting other people.

I had so many people around me that I trusted, and I should have just been way more bold in saying, screw it, I'm going to do it my way.

When you want to change an organization of 200,000 people, it is almost like changing a government.

The biggest change we have done, and the biggest change we are doing, is cultural change.

The only thing you can do is to be authentic. One thing people can read across cultures is whether you are being genuine or not.

You have to lead by example. Banks need to be seen by their clients and stakeholders as entities that behave properly. That starts with the CEO.

Examples start from the top. You pass on a message of ethics.

You either sell a dream, or you say what you think and do what you say.

Henry and George modeled how a really good partnership can work for 50 years.

You need to build a team around you.

Hire for Attitude, Fire for Aptitude. The world is full of smart people. It is those smart people who have the right attitude that make organisations great.

From this day forward, I will speak only in English.

The virtues that should guide a business are faith, righteousness, and benevolence.

Deep change doesn't happen just overnight. Members must continue to speak out and communicate with each other to find a right direction as we are facing unprecedented challenges.

I would rather be judged by the products we build than by the interviews I give.

To be a good founder, you have to be disagreeable, but humility is also needed.

The CEO is no longer you. No longer me. You are a supporter. Stop telling the CEO what to do.

I am an insecure guy, I always want to be better.

My time here has given me great belief in the immense potential of our team, our vision, and our commitment to driving Indonesia's digital transformation.

As one of the early investors in Gojek and a commissioner of GOTO, I have always had great confidence in the company. If my nomination is approved by the shareholders, I will dedicate myself fully to GOTO and work together with other members of the board to drive progress across business units, continuously optimize the company's strategy towards profitability targets, and strengthen the foundation for long-term growth.

If I couldn't earn their respect, I could not lead.

When push comes to shove, most founders are not able to take those hard decisions.