How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers

The most important thing is to keep both ears open, because you never know if a nugget of an idea can actually translate to a big success in the company. One of the things I have learned is not to dismiss the ideas. I catalogue all the ideas I get, then I send it out to my people, saying, “Hey, I listened to this group of people talk about our prod

TIM COOK CEO, Apple

So what does it mean if you want to get speed in a big company? Not just a little start-up—we’re 350,000 people. So, we set about it in a couple of fundamental ways. One is we’ve built design thinking. In fact, we have thirty-two labs around the world. We’ve hired every design graduate there is on this planet. And the idea is that everything you us

Between 60 and 70 percent of my time is spent on the strategy of the business, the customers, and engagement—traveling around the world on the customer side of the business. It’s important, in my role, to be out meeting with not only our congressional leaders and our government leaders to make sure we’re aligned with what their needs are, and their

We took these kernels of best practices and, in essence, have now developed a whole systemic approach: “Here’s how you use this best practice to improve the efficacy of whatever that functional area is within that company.” The way I like to think about it, we install the best practices in those businesses that actually crack the Rubik’s Cube of pr

“My contribution to making it a better world is running a good JPMorgan Chase. I tell people, ‘If I don’t do a good job at JPMorgan Chase, I hurt the opportunities for our people. I hurt the opportunities for the two thousand hamlets we do business in. We can be philanthropic. We can help people grow. If I do a good job, we can do all those things.

“When I look back at those days and the formative elements of who we were in our communities, I see parents who gave generously of their time, energy, effort, and intellectual capacity. That led me to always think about striving for excellence.”

KEN GRIFFIN Founder and CEO, Citadel; Founder, Citadel Services

I made a list of products that I might sell online. I started force-ranking them, and I picked books. Books are super unusual in one respect, which is that there are more items in the book category than there are in any other category. There are three million different books in print around the world at any given time. So the founding idea of Amazo