Our goal is to make General Motors the most valuable automotive company. Clearly, that is having sustainable profitability and driving great returns for our shareholders.
If the company depends entirely on you - your creativity, ingenuity, inspiration, salesmanship or charisma - nobody will want to buy it. The risk and the dependency are too great.
Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers.
The Kirov is a great ballet company because it has so many terrific dancers, but it doesn't always know what to do with them.
Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.
In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry.
I really think the acoustics that Gibson's been making for the last ten years or so are as good as any the company has ever produced and that's saying a lot.
I was never a leading man. I've always been in the outer concentric circles in the company, being a character actor, which is a good place to be. It gives you that diversity.
In a small company, you often see a lot more of what goes on in a broader range of things. And that's good.
Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, 'Too much of a good thing can be wonderful'.
But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it's a lie and they're protected if the person's famous or it's a company.
The future will be less predictable, forecast rises will shrink, company lifetimes will shrink, new entrants will proliferate and it's going to just get more unpredictable.
But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.
The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
Life at a public company ain't for me. The board pays you what you're worth, then you get reamed for your compensation.
If we reduce social life to the smallest possible unit we will find that there is no social life in the company of one.
It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.
Larry, I spent probably most of my professional life helping to build Enron Corporation. I don't think there was anyone that was as shocked by the - by the collapse of the company as I was.
If life was so easy that you could just go buy success, there would be a lot more successful companies in the world.
A person's life is over in 50, 100 years. But a company lives on through the people it is composed of, and SoftBank group has to survive even after I'm gone.
I feel like I enjoy the company of Whoopi deeply, and my private life is my private life.
