Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If I have learned nothing else in all my years here, my biggest lesson is you have to constantly reinvent this company. That's how you get to be 103 years old.
One thing I always think about in making a market, and it again is something I have learned from Sam [Palmisano] as well, he always says, "Be first and be lonely."
I make time to exercise. It's not being indulgent. I think it's got a lot to do with your ability to manage properly and stay focused. There's no doubt about that.
When you manage your company for long-term shareholders, and you manage the company for clients, two of the biggest stakeholders, you will make the right decisions.
I think, particularly in our tech industry, this is an industry that has violent innovation and then commoditization, and it's a cycle of innovation/commoditization.
I've made lots of mistakes. Probably the worst one - I would say they tie. It's either when I didn't move fast enough on something, or I didn't take a big enough risk.
Netweaver was going to be the number one middleware player in the world. We heard about Netweaver day and night. Oracle became number one. No one talks about Netweaver.
There are so many immigrant-led success stories in the United States, and the fact that it's gotten so much harder for educated folks to stay here is really unfortunate.
From the time that I can remember, I worked to make money - either baby-sitting, or one year wrapping gifts at a department store at Christmas, so I could have my own money.
We provide business advice and guidance. We started it here in India first, and now we have taken it globally. India was the first for startup incubation in the world for us.
I defend the right of almost everything to be published... because I think that you're better off in trusting the marketplace than allowing other people to make that decision.
Not only did I enjoy the creative side of Playboy and enjoy being surrounded by people who are curious about life, but I also love the analytical and hard business side of it.
Let your customers be your partners; let your vendors be your employees. What's necessary in this transformation more than anything else is courage and a willingness to change.
Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we'll augment our intelligence.
As I say to our own team: 'Never protect your past, never define yourself by a single product, and always continue to steward for the long-term. Keep moving towards the future.'
The fact is that our business is fundamentally really strong. We have a platform and a depth that no one in the tech industry has. This means we have competitors at every layer.
Big Data will spell the death of customer segmentation and force the marketer to understand each customer as an individual within eighteen months, or risk being left in the dust.
As much as people say they love change, they love it when you change - not when you want them to change. Even when it comes to processes they don't like, they're afraid of change.
If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet. Cloud? That's not new; it's a new name.
What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.
I am big on - even with our whole team - it's always about, well, what were the lessons learned? Something didn't work out? What are the lessons learned? What are the lessons learned?
In the cloud, customers don't want a six-month contract negotiation; that concept is absurd when you can implement a cloud-based suite from beginning to end in a month or a few months.
But maybe because the dot-com world gives people positions at a younger age, and many women are prominent in this business, it will help change the view about who can run big companies.
We're fortunate in my family because we really have three families: my brother, David, and me; the two boys, Cooper and Marston, from my dad's second marriage; and my dad's wife, Crystal.
If we would change the basis and align what is taught in school with what is needed with business... that's where I came up with this idea of 'new collar.' Not blue collar or white collar.
I'd actually call myself pretty much a liberal. A progressive liberal. Because I do think that government is there to be a provider of services for people who cannot provide for themselves.
I come from Wall Street, and you'll never see me do a PowerPoint because I'm all about Excel spreadsheets. If it's not in the numbers, I don't care how strategic it is; it doesn't play out.
My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning.
We didn't have much money. My whole extended family used to help us, and buy us books and food. It was hard, and there were things I didn't want to talk about. But at the end I was a happy girl.
That's why our country is such a beautiful, beautiful experiment: We manifest, we allow freedom if you follow certain rules and if you work really hard. That's at the root of our cherished values.
I literally went down to my car and thought, 'Oh my God, SAP bought Concur - maybe tomorrow they'll buy Dairy Queen.' It was the best thing that happened to me on the day I was named CEO of Oracle.
We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.
Hardware ultimately is a scale game, and it's a differentiation game. If you are literally selling products that are completely undifferentiated, like x86 servers, why would anybody pay you for that?
The way deals are done, every idea is looked at 50 different ways. Now, the market continues to change all the time. And we are always looking at everything in evaluating how it fits with our strategy.
While I have always had a good relationship with my father, much of the time it has been a very limited relationship until I was older. So you can't really give him credit or blame for how I turned out.
For CEOs today, it's all about acheieving growth and efficiency through innovation. It's not about product innovation so much anymore as about innovating business models. process, culture and management.
Try not to be either intimidated by or a captive of jargon. Even though it's language, and language is about communication, it often exists actually to obfuscate and to control power and not to communicate.
It's our privilege to work with College Track students as they chart their course toward a college degree - they bring persistence, creativity, and extraordinary discipline throughout their academic journey.
I've had this conversation with friends who have had challenging relationships with one or another parent. The only thing I can say is what I feel: The other person isn't going to change. That is who they are.
I've got a distribution system that goes to 170 countries. If I acquire properly, you know, you may be successful in one or two countries, or one place; I can scale, and that's part of the value that IBM brings.
As a parent, you have to be good coach and bad coach, and I think in the college-application process, I didn't want to be bad coach. 'This is amazing! I'm so proud of you!' That's the role I wanted with my kids.
If I weren't a theatre designer, I wouldn't be any other kind of designer. Design is interesting to me as it relates to narrative: the design has to support the narrative. Storytelling is the most important thing.
It's so deeply disturbing to me that half of the eligible voters don't vote in this country. We talk about how divided the country is. The truth is, we don't even know. We just know what the half that voted thought.
Billy not only had a distinguished career in the Legislature, but he also has great business instincts and has done exceedingly well making investment decisions in both stocks and private ventures such as real estate.
Some people make their choice on size. I happen to not be a believer in that. I've often said, especially in an industry that's clamoring for growth, if I wanted size, I wouldn't have divested $8 billion of businesses.
When I first came to Playboy, I thought I would go on and do something else in a few years. But when the company got into trouble with political and regulatory challenges, I felt that I could really lead the turn around.
Everyone talks about how much data's in the world. Except, actually, 80% of it is pretty blind to computers. I mean, it can store it. But if it's a movie, a poem, a song, it doesn't know what it's actually saying or doing.
IBM's long-standing mantra is 'Think.' What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.
I don't think that people think of Marvel in the same way that people think of Pixar. Because Pixar is story-orientated, and they think of these guys as epic movie orientated. But they're story-orientated. That's the secret.
When my father left us, my mother went back to school immediately. She went to school in the day while we were at school, and she worked at night. She worked very hard to never let someone define her as a victim or a failure.