Carol Bartz

“I hug employees all the time. I'm a huge contact person. Touch is an extremely important part of the human condition.”

“My first day as a manager was at Digital Equipment in Atlanta. I was a sales rep. I was promoted from among my peers, so one day I was a peer, and the next day I was their boss.”

“Social does not just equal Facebook. Social is how people interact anywhere.”

“My grandmother raised me. She was a real no-nonsense but very funny lady. I drove tractors, made hay, milked cows, fed the chicken, fed the pigs.”

“If you sit quiet long enough, you find out what people really think.”

“If I had my way, I wouldn't do annual reviews, if I felt that everybody would be more honest about positive and negative feedback along the way. I think the annual review process is so antiquated.”

“The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they're the most secretive.”

“It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.”

“When trouble strikes, which it always does - bad economy, bad quarter, activists, takeover - when trouble strikes, those board members who don't understand or are not committed are not helpful.”

“Everybody on my team - I couldn't do their jobs. I could not. I really mean that. So I figured out early on that the way you're successful is you hire really successful people.”

“I became a sales manager at Digital Equipment, promoted from within the sales team. My peers were less than excited that I had gotten the job, especially one of my male peers who said he just wasn't going to work for a woman.”

“I always do my firing in the morning because that's when I'm fresh.”

“Managing is a tough job. When you're young, you just think it's a natural progression - I'm good at this, so I'm going to be good at that - and it's not that way at all.”

“I didn't have my first child until I was 40. I actually learned about motherhood from management.”

“Any leader needs to be constantly interested in what's going on in the world, and constantly ready - even when things are going well - to change.”

“The way you manage your company and the way you manage your people has to be totally different.”

“Google is a fierce competitor. I wish I was worth a bazillion dollars; that would be really nice. They're a fierce competitor, and they're very good in search. They're very good with their global map thing.”

“Organizations can get in the way of innovation, because if people are all bound up, and if they don't know if they get to make the decision or somebody else, and if they do, what happens to them, and so on and so forth.”

“Yahoo is a company that is very strong in content.”

“The fact that you can crawl the web is a commodity.”