Ceo Mindset Quotes

Your career is your business. You are its CEO. Complacency breeds failure. As the CEO of your career, you must continually improve your skills, especially the art of communication.

We are each responsible for results. When every employee has this mindset of personal responsibility, the whole company is better for it.

I talk a lot about "the relentless pursuit of perfection." In practice, this can mean a lot of things, and it's hard to define. It's a mindset, more than a specific set of rules. It's not about perfectionism at all costs. It's about creating an environment in which people refuse to accept mediocrity. It's about pushing back against the urge to say that "good enough" is good enough.

CEOs face this choice all the time. Should they confront their shortcomings or should they create a world where they have none? Lee Iacocca chose the latter. He surrounded himself with worshipers, exiled the critics—and quickly lost touch with where his field was going. Lee Iacocca had become a nonlearner.

A dream is a reality when conceived with the mindset of an achiever.

Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton, famously enshrined the company’s customer service aspiration into its “10-foot rule”: Whenever an employee is within ten feet of a customer, they’re expected to look them in the eye, smile, and ask, “How can I help you?

Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth. And remember Marina Semyonova, the famed ballet teacher, who chose the students who were energized by criticism. They were all rejecting the idea of fixed ability and selecting instead for mindset.

WE LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow; they’re no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate. That’s great news, because throwing out the dues paradigm leads us toward meritocracy. But to be successful, we need to start thinking more like hackers, acting more like entrepreneurs. We have to work smarter, not just harder. We’ll see throughout the following chapters how Sinatra-style credibility and ladder switching—always parlaying for something more—are the foundation for how the most interesting people and companies in the world succeed. It’s not just how presidents get to the top. It’s how CEOs and comedians and racecar drivers hone their skills and make it in the big leagues. It’s how new businesses grow fast, and old businesses grow faster. It’s how entrepreneurs create life-changing products in record time and inventors parlay dreams for bigger dreams. Hacking the ladder is the mind-set they use to get places. The rest of this book is about becoming good enough to deserve it.

Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time. For example, many of the business leaders and Harvard students I work with exhibit the telltale symptoms of the “workaholic’s curse.” They conceive of all the time spent away from actual work to be a hindrance to their productivity, so they squander it. As one CEO of a telecommunications company in Malaysia told me: “I wanted to be productive because that’s what makes me happy, so I tried to maximize the time I spent working. But, as I later realized, I had too narrowly defined what ‘being productive’ was. I started to feel guilty when I did anything that wasn’t work. Nothing else, not exercise or time with my wife or relaxation, was productive. So I never had time to recharge my batteries, which meant that, ironically, the more I worked, the more my productivity plummeted.

Much as they deny it, CEOs and their boards of directors come to view the companies they run as their own. Should an outsider threaten their prerogatives, they will do everything in their power to repel him. This insiders vs. outsiders mindset violates both the spirit of the corporate democracy and the fiduciary responsibility boards of directors owe to a company’s shareholders. Although the idea of having a gadfly on the board—one who would seek acquisitions or lobby for buyouts—is considered to be heresy among the corporate establishment, viewed from the standpoint of the shareholders’ interests, it makes all the sense in the world.

Dentsu’s core Idea: “Good Innovation. ” As much as anything, The Dentsu Way is really a mind-set. It is a mind-set that uses “Good Innovation. ” to apply a sophisticated set of integrated communication tools to a specific consumer’s needs. But “Good Innovation. ” is really more than a mind-set. As Figure I. 1 shows, it is a corporate philosophy about applying innovation in new and creative ways using new and creative technologies to deliver consumer and social value. The best way to explain Dentsu’s corporate philosophy is to share the message of our current President and CEO, Tatsuyoshi Takashima, as he announced the “Good Innovation. ” philosophy in January 2009. Figure I. 1 Corporate philosophy: Good Innovation. ” | x V

Entrepreneurial employees possess what eBay CEO John Donahoe calls the founder mind-set. As he put it to us, “People with the founder mind-set drive change, motivate people, and just get stuff done.

leadership. The CEOs made inquiries and questioned the status quo. Accepting failure and charting a path to correct it is the telltale sign of a true leader at the helm of a prosperous enterprise.

I consider private equity and venture capital as opposites. In private equity, you start with the numbers, and then you try to fit everything into the numbers. In venture capital, you start with people, and then you try to figure out what numbers you can make.” Mark Kachur, former CEO of CUNO, a company that was acquired for over a billion dollars.

This is one of the reasons the best organizations are often run in tandem. The combination of the keeper of the vision (CVO) and the operator (the CFO or COO). It is a partnership of complementary skill sets. We are more likely to get these partnerships if we adjust the formal hierarchies in our companies to promote the right mindset to fit the purpose of the job. This means that we need to stop seeing the CEO as number one and the CFO or COO as number two and start thinking of them as vital partners in a common cause. One does not know how to do the other’s job better than they do (which is why they need each other).

I talk a lot about “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” In practice, this can mean a lot of things, and it’s hard to define. It’s a mindset, more than a specific set of rules. It’s not about perfectionism at all costs. It’s about creating an environment in which people refuse to accept mediocrity. It’s about pushing back against the urge to say that “good enough” is good enough.

The decision to disrupt a business model that is working for you requires no small amount of courage. It means intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope that a long-term risk will pay off. Routines and priorities get disrupted. Traditional ways of doing business get slowly marginalized and eroded—and start to lose money—as a new model takes over. That’s a big ask, in terms of a company’s culture and mindset. When you do it, you’re saying to people who for their entire careers have been compensated based on the success of their traditional business: “Don’t worry about that too much anymore. Worry about this instead.” But this isn’t profitable yet, and won’t be for a while. Deal with this kind of uncertainty by going back to basics: Lay out your strategic priorities clearly. Remain optimistic in the face of the unknown. And be accessible and fair-minded to people whose work lives are being thrown into disarray.

I encourage you to treat this first meeting like a job interview, where you are interviewing to be the CEO of the seller’s company. Remember, having the right attitude is a critical component of the CEO mindset. It is here where it will start to move from theory to action. Be respectful and polite. Thank them for taking the time to meet with you and let them know you are interested in their opportunity. Give a history of your background, highlighting relevant accomplishments. Explain why you’re actively on the search, that you have a process, that you have taken the time to meet with banks and have arranged access to enough capital, and that you are committed to finding the right business in a certain timeframe. Compliment them by complimenting the business. Do this by highlighting a few characteristics that draw your interest to the company.

Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth. And remember Marina Semyonova, the famed ballet teacher, who chose the students who were energized by criticism. They were all rejecting the idea of fixed ability and selecting instead for mindset. Proving

I use examples of people who made it to the top to show how far the growth mindset can take you: Believing talents can be developed allows people to fulfill their potential. However, this point is crucial: The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties. The growth-minded athletes, CEOs, musicians, or scientists all loved what they did, whereas many of the fixed-minded ones did not. Many growth-minded people didn’t even plan to go to the top. They got there as a result of doing what they love. It’s ironic: The top is where the fixed-mindset people hunger to be, but it’s where many growth-minded people arrive as a by-product of their enthusiasm for what they do. This point is also crucial. In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful.

A successful execution-mindset CEO drives their firm to great heights within an initial ecosystem. A transformational CEO takes their firm across ecosystems to redefine value creation and competition through new architectures and configurations. Both types—the Ballmers and the Nadellas—have necessarily developed an execution mindset to have succeeded in the first ecosystem. It is the second type that become legends. The difference lies in the ability to rediscover the alignment mindset required to succeed in the next ecosystem.

While the CEO sets the tone, it is team leaders who manage the details of action and interaction, with internal and external partners. Alignment mindset matters throughout the organization.

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

You are there to do the strategic thinking; be self-aware and have a growth mindset. But most of all, be aware of your ego and contain it to be of service to others. Work on yourself and it will pay dividends. No one likes a leader who has a big ego. Remember the old saying that ‘People won’t remember what you say, but they’ll always remember how you make them feel.

His mantra was simple: “Do what you need to do to make it better.” Of all the things I learned from Roone, this is what shaped me the most. When I talk about this particular quality of leadership, I refer to it as “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” In practice that means a lot of things, and it’s hard to define. It’s a mindset, really, more than a specific set of rules. It’s not, at least as I have internalized it, about perfectionism at all costs (something Roone wasn’t especially concerned about). Instead, it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity. You instinctively push back against the urge to say There’s not enough time, or I don’t have the energy, or This requires a difficult conversation I don’t want to have, or any of the many other ways we can convince ourselves that “good enough” is good enough.

The two long helical (like a corkscrew) DNA strands are intertwined without touching one another other than being connected through nucleotide pairs that run between them—sort of like a twisted ladder, as depicted below.31

The best CEOs recognize this dynamic and, in turn, approach setting the direction of their company with a different mindset. They embrace uncertainty with a view that fortune favors the bold. They’re less a “taker” of their fate and more a “shaper”—constantly looking for and acting on opportunities that bend the curve of history. CEOs who embrace this mindset are well aware that only 10 percent of companies create 90 percent of the total economic profit (profit after subtracting the cost of capital) and that the top quintile performers deliver thirty times more economic profit than the companies in the next three quintiles combined. And here’s the kicker: The odds of moving from being an average performer to a top-quintile performer over a ten-year period are only one in twelve.

Raising the spirits of your leaders doesn’t happen overnight.

67% of CEOs want more technology work done directly within business functions.

To quote Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky: “In a world that is fast changing, one of the things we know is that things that survive in the world are the things that are most adaptive. The things that are most adaptive are things that constantly change.

Learning the nuts and bolts of the company could later give you a big advantage. All of our top growth-mindset CEOs knew their companies from top to bottom, inside out, and upside down.

Sir Richard Branson (CEO and Founder of Virgin Company) inspires me to build my best...and then continue building. An entrepreneurial mindset can always benefit from a daily dose of what I buzz 'Branson-spiration'...

The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist in them right alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist. Recognizing this is important because it’s easy to make the mistake of changing what we say without changing our body language, facial expressions, and behavior. So what should we do? A good first step is to watch for mismatches between our words and actions. When we slip up—and we will—we can simply acknowledge that it’s hard to move away from a fixed, pessimistic view of the world. One of Carol’s colleagues, Susan Mackie, works with CEOs and encourages them to give names to their inner fixed-mindset characters. Then they can say things like “Oops. I guess I brought Controlling Claire to the meeting today. Let me try that again.” Or: “Overwhelmed Olivia is struggling to deal with all the competing demands, can you help me think this through?” Ultimately, adopting a gritty perspective involves recognizing that people get better at things—they grow.

It’s a long time before you begin to enjoy putting in effort and a long time before you begin to think in terms of learning. Instead of seeing your time at the bottom of the corporate ladder as an insult, you slowly see that you can learn a lot at the bottom that could help you greatly on your rise to the top. Learning the nuts and bolts of the company could later give you a big advantage. All of our top growth-mindset CEOs knew their companies from top to bottom, inside out, and upside down.

Unlike John Lasseter’s bosses at Disney, Bezos was open to the entrepreneurial contributions of Amazon’s individual employees—even when those ideas were outside what Wall Street (and even his own board of directors) considered the company’s core business. AWS represents precisely the kind of value creation any CEO or shareholder would want from their employees. Want your employees to come up with multibillion-dollar ideas while on the job? You have to attract professionals with the founder mind-set and then harness their entrepreneurial impulses for your company. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith told us, “A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow.

Not that everyone will become a leader. Sadly, most managers and even CEOs become bosses, not leaders. They wield power instead of transforming themselves, their workers, and their organization.

Starbucks Venture Scape Summary Starbucks had been driving rapid expansion globally but in the process the company had lost some of its magic with customers. In an eighteen-month period, ceo Howard Schultz and his leadership team undertook a venture to reframe the company’s mission, shift employee mind-sets, and reinvigorate the customer experience to bring Starbucks back to its roots.

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them. When Enron, the energy giant, failed—toppled by a culture of arrogance—whose fault was it? Not mine, insisted Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO and resident genius. It was the world’s fault. The world did not appreciate what Enron was trying to do. What about the Justice Department’s investigation into massive corporate deception? A “witch hunt.

Alfred P. Sloan, the former CEO of General Motors, presents a nice contrast. He was leading a group of high-level policy makers who seemed to have reached a consensus. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here….Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.” Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., reported that the ancient Persians used a version of Sloan’s techniques to prevent groupthink. Whenever a group reached a decision while sober, they later reconsidered it while intoxicated.

So, whether we are an Olympic Gymnast, a corporate CEO, a brain surgeon or a full time parent, you will face challenges. The key is to relish them. Your brain is muscle, and it needs to be challenged in order to grow.