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For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored.
Investment banking is not a business; it is a personal service where bankers work hand in hand with their clients. And it is a service that must not simply be about making bigger and bigger deals that reap rewards for only a small group of executives.
I've got corporate executives, my bosses... this is true... who will text message me... and say, 'Hey a, heard you had chemotherapy today, want me to stop by and pick you up something to eat and bring it to you?' Whose boss does that? My bosses do that.
Critics might contend that putting former private-sector CEOs in the president's Cabinet places the fox in the henhouse. But it's unlikely such executives would expose themselves to the headaches if they weren't genuinely motivated by the call to service.
When you get into your 40s, the roles do tend to drop off, and I've seen it happening to friends of mine. Hopefully it is improving, and there are female TV executives now who are championing women of all ages in leading roles. But I'm not counting on it.
It takes a while for executives to understand that every company is a spatial company, fundamentally: where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales. But when they get it, they light up and say, 'I want to get the geographic advantage.'
We really think highly of the executives at SBC. And Microsoft is one of the great companies of the 21st century. It is in all of our best interests to work together. In this new wave of technology, you can't do it all yourself; you have to form alliances.
I'm not interested in making all-black films - I come from a very diverse culture; I want to work with every type of person. I work a lot with women executives because they seem to be a lot more open minded about that and a lot more progressive in that way.
I believe that everyone in a company should pitch in to foster a culture of ownership and respect. At KIND, this belief translates to everyone being in the trenches - from team members just starting out to executives who have been with the company for years.
And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.
The classic problem as an entrepreneur is that they have a hard time delegating. But that's really crazy. Recruiting other executives is critical, so is dealing with customers and dealing with regulators. Those are functions that only the top founders can do.
Pilot season can be maddening. You're basically putting yourself and your talent out there to be scrutinized several times a day for months by network executives who have probably never acted in anything since their junior high school production of 'The Wiz.'
In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging.
I used to have a group called Bad-Movie Saturday. Every Saturday, six of us would go see the worst movie that came out each weekend. It'd be noon in Burbank. It was just a running commentary. All executives - we would each talk through the movie and make jokes.
When we first started, I had the time to personally live every project. As I continue to build the company, I've learned much better ways to delegate and let the executive team run. It's just as exciting for me to see the executives succeed as it is the artists.
I thought I was attractive when I shot 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding.' Studio executives and movie reviewers let me know I had a confidence in my looks that was not shared by them. In other words, they labeled me with words like overweight, unattractive, unappealing.
Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else.
I hadn't made a big-budget film, and in Hollywood there's a sort of man and boys situation. You're a man, you make $80 million movies! As if it's harder to make an $80 million movie. Well, I guess businesswise it is because you have more executives to argue with.
The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.
Yahoo was Jerry Yang's baby. He did a great job creating the baby. Unfortunately, some of the key executives after the foundation of the company couldn't keep up with the technology innovation of the industry. They thought that Yahoo should become a media company.
I've always loved and enjoyed the theatre, but I have to say that none of our sponsorships have been done because I'm one of those chairmen and chief executives who goes gooey-eyed about something. They are done for a very specific marketing and commercial agenda.
During the financial crisis, I worked with hundreds of executives who struggled as a result of their thoughts about job security. When their beliefs changed, so did their emotional experience - and they were then able to focus on the task at hand more effectively.
Defining, embedding, and living core beliefs set the stage for executives and employees to connect. Through actions that consistently convey who we are and how we act, executives can inspire employees to believe in the organization's values and buy in to its brand.
The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck.
It's pretty easy in theatre. The comedy's either physical or verbal, and you're looking at the whole frame at once. But TV executives want close-ups. I keep telling them to look at Preston Sturges' movies. He'll do a whole scene without a cut in it, and it's a riot.
While one should never underestimate the ability of risk-besotted financiers to wreak havoc, the real threat to capitalism isn't unfettered financial cunning. It is, instead, the unwillingness of executives to confront the changing expectations of their stakeholders.
Business colleagues who have not seen each other for a long time but who have a good relationship can always shake hands warmly and grab each other's right upper arm or shoulder with their free left hand. Men and women executives should not kiss each other in public.
We invited HP executives to participate in the management and in the board. HCL had this concept of corporate officers since inception in 1999. We had a remuneration committee. Now everyone is talking about nomination and remuneration committee. We had this from 1999.
The average member of the public thinks of 'business' as an impersonal corporate entity owned by the very rich and managed by overpaid executives. There is an almost total failure to appreciate that 'business' actually embraces - in one way or another - most Americans.
Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.
As I've seen over and over again during my career, the best way to deter individual conduct is the threat of going to jail. That's what truly changes behavior. That's what changes the calculus as employees and executives decide whether to participate in an illegal scheme.
Mitt Romney has won the 2012 presidential nomination by promising Republicans that he would end a so-called 'culture of dependency' on welfare - welfare defined as 'free stuff' and food stamps for poor folks, not tax breaks for Big Oil or tax shelters for Bain executives.
The '80s to me, more than anything else, represents a time of real criminal activity in the office of the president: an incredibly disparate economy in terms of the class distinctions and whatnot, and a tremendous shallowness - a lot of sort of bank robbery by executives.
Most executives are male, so it's always sort of their vision of stuff. I'm constantly fighting against that even when I play the wife or the girlfriend or the best friend. I always try my hardest to bring as much layering in and not make things stereotypical, but it's hard.
Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces.
I've never had a relationship with a record executive. I always went to the record company by someone that liked my playing. Then they would get fired, and I'd be left with the record company. And then - because they got fired - the record company wouldn't do anything for me.
Too many talk about a company's leadership, referring to the senior most executives in the organization. They are just that: senior executives. Leadership doesn't automatically happen when you reach a certain pay grade. Hopefully you find it there, but there are no guarantees.
A master performer like Bill Clinton never lost sight of the fact that as president he had to project confidence and power, but if he was speaking to a group of autoworkers he would adjust his accent and his words to fit the audience, and do the same for a group of executives.
Anyone who has followed the U.S. economy in recent years can tell you while corporate America and their wealthy executives have recovered from the last recession, middle-class families have not. About 95 percent of income gains between 2009 and 2012 went to the top one percent.
The film industry is driven by male narrative. Heads of studios are often men, teeming with male executives everywhere you look, and so the narratives we have the screenwriters usually for male leads. Women tend to be second string: the girlfriend of, the secretary who becomes.
Nothing so enchants attorneys general, their eyes generally fixed on higher public office, as slinging accusations against successful financial executives. Preening press conferences and fawning media coverage are virtually guaranteed, whether or not the charges have substance.
I think a lot of times people look at me and say, 'Well, we can't possibly hand a show over to her to run.' It seemed like executives would be worried about me controlling a room and having power, and I'd say, 'Oh, I can control a room. I can give an order like nobody's business.'
Over a period of time, if you have a successful show, then you have a devoted audience. I feel you owe something to them. That goes for everybody - writers, camera operators, actors, studio executives, etc. Sadly, I've realized it's a responsibility that very few people live up to.
I wasn't naive, but at the end of my Miss America year, when two different executives attacked me during what I thought were informational interviews about jobs, I was shocked. I didn't see it coming, and the worst thing about it was the shame I felt, as if I'd done something wrong.
You can get a good handle on a company's culture before you even get inside the building. For example, when companies say, 'We value our employees' but have reserved parking spots, a private cafeteria, and over-the-top offices for the executives, that tells you more than any PR spin.
With the rabbit as our emblem, when we got to the point in 1960 of opening the first Playboy Club... one of our executives suggested the possibility of a bunny costume. We tried it out, and I made some modifications - added the cuffs and the bow tie and collar - and the bunny was born.
Twitter could save a lot of money by writing its executives' names on their doors with pencil instead of fancy placards. Like an episode of 'Suits,' Twitter execs come, go, change jobs and disappear under black clouds every few minutes. Office administration costs must be astronomical!
Women are usually only interesting to studio executives when they are fecund, between the ages of 15 and 30. I decided to get through the really tough patch, around 50, by just cutting my price and playing ten years older. I didn't want to have to wait until I was an old lady to play one.
I found Hollywood pretty bruising and uncreative. The executives are all in thrall to the boss, and spend their times double-guessing him or her, and trying to remember what he/she said and then applying them to the script, whether it was useful or not. They're all in fear for their jobs.
The only way the gender divide affected me was the social things the younger guy executives could do with their bosses. I don't know what went on in the clubs, because I didn't go. I made sure my work was stellar, and that compensated for whatever social time we weren't spending together.