CEO QUOTES

• "[Reputation management is] the ability to help companies explain what they stand for to all of their stakeholders and to protect the company from competitors and others who would in any way disparage the company."Siemens AG senior VP corporate affairs and marketing for U.S. operations Jack Bergen
• "We shouldn't fool ourselves. We can't pretend that there has been no reputational damage. Experience says it goes away after two or three years."UBS chairman Peter Kurer
• "I repeat: Today we’re in an all-out war for reputation. Our companies are battling – to an unprecedented extent – for our most vital assets: our own identities."Abbott chairman and CEO Miles D. White
• "A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well."Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon
• "Reputation is still a precious commodity in banking. Although profitability may be the best foundation of a bank's name, its name is also the best foundation of its long-term profitability."The Economist, February 23, 2008
• "If you live by your basic values, you'll a) get through it, and b) feel satisfied that you did the best you could."Bob Eckert, CEO, Mattel, on getting through crisis
• "A company just has to get into a serious situation and not address it properly and their reputation can be irreparably harmed."Alan Boeckmann, Chairman and CEO, Fluor Corporation
• "As in business, having a Presidential vision doesn't mean announcing 'Here's where we're going.' It means making the case until Presidential tonsils bleed." Former GE CEO Jack Welch, BusinessWeek, February 4, 2008.
• "You can never err on the side of communication as a leader. In the absence of communication, you will be surprised by the incredible things they assume about you." Carter S. Roberts, CEO, U.S. World Wildlife Fund, Knowledge@Wharton, January 9, 2008
• "You don't get a chance to live through a lot of crises. You've got to do it, you've got to do it once, [and] you've got to have light at the end of the tunnel or else you will lose people, you will lose talent, you will lose customers." Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO, Xerox
• "To profit, you have to know what value to create." Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO, Xerox
• "Who you are, what your values are, what you stand for...They are your anchor, your north star. You won't find them in a book. You'll find them in your soul." Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO, Xerox
• "I don’t want an easy business for competitors. I want a business with a moat around it. I want a very valuable castle in the middle, and then I want a duke who is in charge of that castle to be very honest, hardworking, and able. Then I want a moat around that castle." Warren Buffet
• "Twenty-first century CEOs will be judged not only by how well they changed their industries, but also how well they led their companies to have positive impacts on the world." Hector Ruiz, chairman and CEO, AMD, Chief Executive, December 7, 2007
• "Real reputation management doesn't happen on center stage. It starts and ends behind the scenes with a company's integrity."Agnes Huff, Ph.D. President & CEO Agnes Huff Communications Group, The Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2007
• "Hope isn't a [recovery] plan. You better assume that Plan B is not going to materialize either, so what's Plan C and D? Limit the damage. Make sure that the problem is identified and there are fences put around it."JetBlue Airways CEO Dave Barger, The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2007
• “Being a CEO is now not just about financial results. It's about a whole set of other dimensions that are more difficult to quantify, [and] more difficult to control and deal with. We have more constituencies. More requirements than ever before. The pressure is higher, and the tenure is shorter." Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd
• “Today, good business is generated by good corporate citizenship – your stance on the environment, your stance on governance, your stance on CEO pay.” Boeing CEO Jim McNerney
• “...the age of the authoritarian CEO is over and chief executives today need to have the whole range of 'softer skills.' They need to be good listeners, consensus builders, ambassadors to the larger world, and leaders that others follow not because they have to but because they want to." Joe Nocera, International Herald Tribune
• “Everything a CEO says and does is no longer personal. It is attributed to the company.”
  Ogilvy & Mather CEO Shelly Lazarus
• “There is no better way to deal with a mistake than to acknowledge it, fix it and move forward.”
  Home Depot CEO Frank Blake
• “I can flap my lips all I want. Talk is cheap. Watch us.”
  JetBlue CEO David Neeleman
• “The five most dangerous words in business may be ‘Everybody else is doing it.’”
  Warren Buffett
• "But I think the lesson that came out of the early 2000s with all the investigations is the importance of reputational risk." >Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill
• “A CEO is ultimately responsible for the growth of a company as evidenced by its financial performance, its capacity for self-renewal, and its character. The only way you can measure character is by reputation.”
  Former Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta
• “If you don’t like bad news, you should get out of the leadership business. Your job is to hear as much bad news as there is out there and to figure out ways of dealing with it.”
  Canada’s first female Prime Minister Kim Campbell
• “More and more, the job of a CEO is to hawk his or her world-view, both internally and externally.”
  Fortune, November 18, 2002
• "Exceptional business leaders do what no computer can do. They scan the external environment, and out of all the things that are going on in the world, they are able to identify the significant patterns and trends."
  Management consultant and author Ram Charan
• "The primary task of leadership is to communicate the vision and the values of an organization. Second, leaders must win support for the vision and the values they articulate. And third, leaders have to reinforce the vision and the values.”
  Fedex Chairman and CEO Frederick Smith
• "Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom….I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything else was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.”
  Wal-Mart Founder Sam Walton
• "What that says to me is that you have to have strategic vision and peripheral vision. Strategic vision is the ability to look ahead and peripheral vision is the ability to look around, and both are important."
  Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina
• "The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It’s to make meaning.”
  Xerox Parc Guru John Seely Brown
• “HR at GE is not an agenda item; it is the agenda.”
  GE CEO Jeff Immelt
• “My biggest mistake was to worry about things in too much detail and losing the picture once in a while. I always say to myself that the most important thing is never to lose the plot. No quarter passes with perfection. No year passes with perfection. The real question is: Are you sticking to the plot.”
  Lord John Browne, BP
• “But though competitive financial performance is essential…it isn’t sufficient. It isn’t the whole story.”
  BP’s Lord John Browne
• “To keep a low profile: It’s an advantage to be underestimated.”
  Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons
• “A charismatic CEO can win every argument regardless of the facts. A non-charismatic CEO has to win on the merits of the argument.”
  Management guru and author Jim Collins
• “The idea of a guy coming in on a rescue ship for 24 months…is stupid."
  Former GE CEO Jack Welch
• “I am a hard-working C.E.O. of a very successful company. Celebrity comes from something else.”
  Martha Stewart
• “If you want to analyze a corporation, read its financial statements. If you want to plumb its soul, talk to its chief executive.”
  Fortune 2002
• “Despite the size and complexity of modern corporations, the person in charge still sets the tone, defines the style, becomes the company’s public face.”
  Fortune 2002
• "Secondly, people like to work for good leadership. So creating a culture of leaders that people like is key."
  Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers
• "We are asking them to pitch no-hitters every day." The pitcher is becoming more important than the players or time-tested tactics.”
  Founder John Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas
• "More precisely, every merger team's meeting room should probably contain a large, 'It's the CEO, stupid' sigh. The CEO's personality, style, and preferences will shape the new entity, as surely as they determine the location and layout of company headquarters. Facing that reality can save a lot of time and aggravation."
  Conference Board Melissa Berman
• "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
  Abraham Lincoln
• “Decisions are two-thirds facts and figures and one-third a leap in the dark where you don’t have all the facts. If you increase the one-third, you’re too impulsive but if you increase the two-thirds, you’re not a leader.”
  Pakistan’s President Perez Musharraf, 2006 World Economic Forum
• "Real leaders, in a phrase, move the human heart."
  Management professors and gurus, Warren Bennis and James O'Toole
• "I think the rhetoric of the stock market is concealing from us the fact that what we're actually talking about is owning other people. …When you buy shares in Microsoft, for instance, you are taking a gamble. It's not just a gamble on the profitability of Microsoft; it's more than that. You are gambling that Bill Gates can continue to motivate young people to work like fiends for the company."
  Management author, Charles Handy, 1999
• “We get far more credit than we deserve when things go right and too much blame when they don’t.”
  Former Viacom President Mel Karmizan
• “Any assault on the reputation of a company is a crisis and reputations are built on how management responds to crises.”
  Northwestern University Professor Clarke Caywood
• “In a time of crisis, there is something reassuring about hearing the voice of a person in a position of authority, even if the information being provided is scant.”
  Former of Marsh & McLennan CEO Jeffrey Greenberg
• “I want my identity back. I don’t just want to be known as the CEO of AOL Time Warner. …I’m my own person. I have strong moral convictions. I’m not just a suit. I want the poetry back in my life.”
  Former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin
• "The thing I hope and that I would be proud of is if Amazon.com can create a new standard and actually raise the bar for customer service and customer experience. And if whole new industries look to us and say 'How did they do that and raise that customer service bar?'"
  Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
• “They [CEOs] last five to seven years, and now it’s time to bring out a new vintage.”
  Hal Reiter of Herbert Mines Associates
• “First of all it [what makes Nokia work] comes from how the management team works, how they communicate.”
  Former Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila
• "Take our 20 best people away, and I can tell you that Microsoft would become an unimportant company."
  Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates
• “You’ve got to lead by example. There are CEOs who get to love their office. You’ve got to get out into the markets. You’ve got to meet your customers. You’ve got to understand your competition. You’ve got to give the same speech too many times. You’ve got to go to the lunch bag forum with discipline. I write an article every month for the company newspaper. I do videotapes. I do company broadcasts. Communicate, communicate, communicate! You cannot be a remote image. You’ve got to be touched, felt, heard and believed. And you’ve got to stand up for what you stand for. When the company comes under attack  whether it’s from Washington, the competition, or industry analysts  you’ve got to be out there taking the brunt of whatever it is and lead by example.”
  Former AT&T CEO Mike Armstrong
• "The particular size and shape of a leader's ego, they claim, is less important than his or her authenticity. Inspirational leaders succeed because they effectively communicate themselves--both their virtues and their flaws--to their followers."
  Harvard Business Review 2001
• “I think the CEO today has to be far more hands-on than he has had to be in previous eras. He has to be far more communicative in terms of the various constituencies the company serves. And I think he has to be far more nimble.”
  Former AlliedSignal CEO Larry Bossidy
• "I'm the airline's most visible employee, and its most powerful. When something goes right--or--wrong--the employees and the customers know exactly where to look for an explanation."
  Former Continental Airlines CEO Gordon Bethune
• "But governance experts say that part of the CEO's job is communicating the company's success to the market."
  Business Week 2000
• "Communication needs to be a core competency of any business. It starts with the CEO."
  Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy
• "Secondly, communication has become much more important, especially in large companies where everybody needs a lot of information to keep focused on the mission at hand. Communication from the company’s leadership is essential. I underestimated this many times in my career, especially at Oracle, where we went from 8,000 to 45,000 people. Keeping all those people on the same page required a great deal of communication. If you don’t continually tell them your vision or your strategy, they make up what they think the company is all about, and if you let that go too long, you end up with a disaster. I also think the need to have a real focus on competitive positioning is a significant change in leadership. If the leadership doesn’t have a competitive mindset—how to position products, services, marketing, market share, what your competitor’s weaknesses are, and so on—this could be disastrous as well.”
  Former Oracle president and COO Ray Lane
• “To me transparency means that I will communicate truthfully what I do and don’t know about my company’s performance and prospects, the doubts that I have, and the things I don’t doubt. The goal of transparency is to give the shareholder an opportunity to form an opinion about you, to make a judgment.”
  Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella
• “As important as what you say is what you don’t.”
  Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella
• "Seeing people in person is a big part of how you drive any change process. You have to show people a positive view of the future and say ‘we can do it.’”
  GE CEO Jeff Immelt
• “My first 100 days are all about listening and learning. The last thing you’ll get from me is a grand vision in the first 100 days. You need to give up yourself time to be a sponge.”
  GAP CEO Paul Pressler
• "The one thing you can't get until you actually have the job is understanding context and how your company fits into the world. Until you do the job, you're not aware of the true breadth of the assignment. That's something that I've learned a ton about."
  GE CEO Jeff Immelt
• "I tell these guys: You’re going to be defined by your first 90 days. You’ve got to act.”
  Former GE CEO Jack Welch
• "Leadership transitions have all the interest of a wake, a birth and a wedding all rolled into one.”
  Harvard professor Judith McLaughlin
• “It takes a lifetime to build a reputation, and only a short time to lose it all.”
  Aramark CEO Joseph Neubauer
• "For good or for ill, the reputation of an organization is made through the words and deeds of its members.”
  Professor James O’Toole
• "I never deserved to be put on a pedestal, but I also didn't deserve to be knocked off it so inappropriately."
  Former Eastman Kodak CEO George Fisher
• "Unfortunately, this company developed a bad reputation, and rebuilding its reputation is going to take a little longer than I thought."
  Former Conseco CEO Gary Wendt
• "I violated the Noah rule: predicting rain doesn’t count; building arks does.”
  Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett
• "Blessed is the person who, on departing this earth, leaves behind a good name."
  Talmud
• “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."
  Senator Alan Simpson
• "We have some 10 million customers every day which means that our global reputation matters--our brand name and the values it symbolizes are significant corporate assets."
  BP Lord John Browne
• "Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown."
  Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons
• “Image mattered. I was convinced it was my job.”
  Former GE CEO Jack Welch
• “The good thing about being skinned alive is it comes back thicker.”
  Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli
• “There is an enormous difference between leading an organization and presiding over it.”
  Former AlliedSignal CEO Larry Bossidy
• “As a leader, you have to show up.”
  Former AlliedSignal CEO Larry Bossidy
• "Everything is under a magnifying glass."
  GM CEO Rick Wagoner
• "Every day somebody walks out on strike somewhere. The nature of the job is, you only hear problems—I guess that’s what a CEO’s job is—but good news is few and far between. And if there is good news, they forget to tell you.”
  Ford CEO Bill Ford
• “But what he needs most of all, he adds is resilience. ‘It’s [Resilience] is the number one quality you need today to be a CEO. I have a lot of smart people who couldn’t last in this job. It’s about being hit and being able to stand up again, because the job of CEO is mostly bad news coming across your desk.”
  GlaxoSmithKline CEO JP Garnier
• "Strategy and operational decisions are important, but the defining bets are always made on people."
  PerkinElmer CEO Greg Summe
• "When you are an early general manager, you're so anxious to build your reputation and make everything work that you don't appreciate that a successful track record is a mix of wins and losses. But who wins everything? Chiefs of companies build a track record over a period of up to 10 years."
  Spencer Stuart’s Tom Neff and Dayton Ogden
• "When bad news becomes water torture--bad news followed by bad news by bad news--that's when CEOs lose credibility. This job is all about credibility."
  The Wall Street Journal
• "Trust is like the air we breathe. When it's present, nobody really notices. But when it's absent, everybody notices."
  Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffet
• "I’ve always said I’d rather have a mediocre business strategy and great people than a great business strategy and mediocre people.”
  Former Rubbermaid Joseph Galli Jr.
• "Vision is very important, because you have to have a path where the company is going to go. But visions that you don’t execute on are called hallucinations. The implementation--the execution--is the difficult part. And that's in the details."
  Former Nortel CEO John Roth
• “Leaders get the behaviors they tolerate.”
  Former EDS CEO Dick Brown
• “My first time in front of Wall Street’s analysts as chairman was a bomb.”
  Former GE CEO Jack Welch
• “I always reminded myself: Headquarters doesn’t make anything or sell anything.”
  Former GE CEO Jack Welch
• On employee surveys: “Is the company you read about in the annual report, the company you work for?”
  Former GE CEO Jack Welch
• “Managing image and company reputation is one of the more obvious jobs of the CEO.”
  Former GE CEO Jack Welch
• "We forgot that those of us fortunate enough to lead great companies are but the stewards of legacies we inherited from past leaders and the servants of our stakeholders.”
  Former Medtronics CEO William George
• "One of the first things I did after becoming CEO was talk with 100 employees at all levels across the company to get a sense of where people thought the company was going, what kinds of changes needed to be made, and so on."
  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
• “Gerster did inject a new culture, a new perspective on the world, into a company that had become very insular. That is his most lasting legacy.” Harvard Business School Professor David Yoffie
• “You can’t order change. After all, there’s only one of me and 75,000 of them.”
  Former 3M CEO James McNerney
• “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game.”
  Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner
• “A corporation’s culture is what determines how people behave when they are not being watched.”
  Former Bain Managing Partner Tom Tierney
• “But the biggest single influence on a culture is the company’s boss.”
  The Economist
• “Employees set their behavior by the pole star at the top.”
  The Economist
• "A great leader accepts all the blame and distributes all the credit."
  Vanguard CEO John Brennan
• “Leadership is about building camaraderie and trust.”
  CEO of Xerox Ann Mulcahy
• “It’s most important to play to your strengths and not to conform to someone else’s image of leadership. It allows you to have integrity of style and consistency of character.”
  CEO of Xerox Ann Mulcahy
• “I find that all of a sudden, I am a member of a class—C.E.O.’s—that is held in lower repute than priests.”
  Google CEO Eric Schmidt, 2002
• “The American CEO community has become largely a spectator group as its reputation and its destiny are debated by others.”
  Fortune
• “Maybe the new breed is the old breed. A few CEOs ran amuck, and now we’re swinging back to an era of accountability, integrity and responsibility.”
  GAP CEO Paul Pressler
• “Leadership is an unbelievably hard communications job. You must have a firm grasp of your competitive environment, encapsulate the spirit of an organization, package it in strategic statements, and then emphasize those statements repeatedly, so that the message becomes part of the conversation.”
  Tuck School of Business Dean Paul Danos
• “Behavior is how you express your values in practice.”
  Chevron CEO David O’Reilly

  Reputation

• “Corporate reputation should be considered as much more than simply a brand emblem in the marketplace. Rather, it is a window to the fundamental character of a company and its leaders and as such is relevant to all stakeholders…”
  Harvard Professor Stephen Greyser
• “Our industry commits massive resources to successfully develop new technologies, products and fields for exploration. Yet we’ve been unwilling to apply the same effort to the shared challenges of reputation.”
  Chevron CEO David O’Reilly
• "We now know that the power and reputation of a brand is greater than anyone anticipated in the past..”
  Executive Director of the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies Robert Massie
• “Money corrupts the mind. By the same token, you can find yourself in a situation where you worry more and more about your reputation and become its prisoner. You shouldn’t be worrying about it. It is wrong to worry about whether you will be the hero next month.”
  Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella
• "I believe leadership is more important in a business such as ours where the product is intangible than in a business with conventional products. Put bluntly, we have no patents or proprietary processes that protect us from competition. Our image, our reputation, and the trust that clients have in us and our daily work represent Vanguard's true net worth. And this net worth is created -- or could be destroyed - by our people each and every day."
  Vanguard CEO John J. Brennan
• "Thousands of employees know me only by reputation, so in a real sense, my reputation is everything."
  Former CEO Charles Schwab David Pottruck
• "Reputation is human collateral, the security we pledge against the performance of our obligations as leaders, friends, colleagues, and constituents."
  BP Lord John Browne
• “Companies are also the owners of global brands—worth in our cases several billion dollars. Brand names which differentiate, and are part of a company’s relationship with its customers. Those brands are assets whose value lies in the reputation of the companies they represent. That reputation has to be protected and enhanced—and that means that companies have to perform not just financially but on all other measures by which people judge their quality.”
  BP Lord John Browne
• "Reputation is to be cherished and cared for. A damaged one lowers people's estimation of a leader's worth and their motivation to follow."
  Authors’ James Kouzes and Barry Posner
• "Perhaps the most interesting tool for getting and keeping talent is the corporate brand. A few years ago, a lot of companies got serious about their corporate brand---the company's values and promise of value to customers. Now a striking number of them are translating this to their potential and current employees. The goals: Shorten the recruiting cycle by attracting the kind of people who'll thrive there, get people engaged in the company faster, and keep them motivated through the company's values. It's a matter of thinking through the company's values. It's a matter of thinking through what distinguishes a company from other places where people might work, and then making that value proposition clear to people.”
  Conference Board Melissa Berman
• “The human element of reputation is that it gives people extra energy. It gives you extra lift to do the tough stuff our life consists of day and out.”
  Former Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta
• “Reputation is an account in credit with our customers and stakeholders. The balance can be drawn down as well as augmented.”
  Former Royal Dutch/Shell Chairman Phil Watts
• “Reputation is built on what we do, not what we say we do.”
  Former Royal Dutch/Shell Chairman Phil Watts
• "In today’s world, where ideas are increasingly displacing the physical in the production of economic value, competition for reputation becomes a significant driving force, propelling our economy forward. Manufactured goods often can be evaluated before the completion of a transaction. Service providers, on the other hand, usually can offer only their reputations.”
  Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan
• "Glass, china, and reputation are easily cracked, and never well mended.”
  Benjamin Franklin
• “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena...who -- at the worst -- if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
  President Teddy Roosevelt
• “CEOs are paid to know, CEOs are not paid not to know.”
  HFS CEO Henry Silverman
• “If we had women holding all the public offices, the amount of money on the military would be immediately cut way back and more would be spent on healthcare and education. There wouldn't be lack of family planning or birth control if women ran things.”
  philantrophist Ted Turner
• “I am told a CEO should worry about big-picture stuff and shouldn't be concerned about minute details. I am obsessed with details, I will be an irritant, and I am persistent. I am going to grumble if the shop floor is cluttered or too greasy.”
  CEO Wantanabe of Toyota Motor
• “Texas City was a tragedy. And when I listen to the trader tapes there is no doubt, what happened may not have broken the law, but it broke our values.”
  New BP American President Bob Malone
• “As demoralizing as a slide down may be, the ride up is infinitely more exhilarating.”
  New Ford Motor CEO Alan Mulally
• “When new CEO Jonathan Schwartz was asked if it was at all difficult talking to analysts, other CEOs and customers when former Sun Microsystems CEO and founder Scott McNealy relinquished the job, Schwartz said: It wasn't difficult. It was terrifying.”
  New Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz