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I learned a lot from Jack Welch about how to run a business.

We gained his operational capabilities and he gained our marketing skills.

Businessmen... were not born chief executives. They were often people first.

As a young analyst just out of Stanford business school in the 1960s, I got to really understand what growth was about. Back then, you had to ask a customer to pay some money. That was the most important thing in getting a company off the ground.

Every time a new CEO came, I got a promotion till I was made CEO myself.

If you look at firms like General Electric or other large companies, they don't just do one thing; they do many different things to generate sources of revenue.

If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job.

Yeah, I think that his great creation was not any one product but a company in which creativity was connected to great engineering. And that will survive at least while the current people who trained under Steve are there.

Clearly, as a CEO, you have other functions that are managed by other people.

The most common way to grow a business is by overseeing each and every aspect of the company - the 'ground up' method.