Without execution, ‘vision’ is just another word for hallucination.
Mark V. Hurd
Processes break in two ways. They break because they don’t have the right checks and balances and because they don’t have the right execution.
Mark V. Hurd
I have been competing against IBM my whole career. It’s a good company, with good management and a good team.
Mark V. Hurd
The day you feel like you’ve won, you need to drive out of the parking lot and not come back.
Mark V. Hurd
I know only a few ways to take market share and drive new revenue. I can engineer better products and services, I can build better relationships with my customers and deliver a higher level of service, or I can give my customers a lower price.
Mark V. Hurd
My objective with strategy is to be very repetitive, to be somewhat boring, to allow people to coalesce behind a common direction.
Mark V. Hurd
The fact that everything ever works perfectly together, anybody who tells you that is pulling your leg.
Mark V. Hurd
My daughter’s got a smartphone in her hand with roughly the same power as a mainframe circa 1982, and she’s running around Beijing and wants an answer as fast as she can.
Mark V. Hurd
There’s money in the old stuff, but there’s more wealth created in the new growth areas.
Mark V. Hurd
When someone gets a job, it better be clear what they did to get it.
Mark V. Hurd
We need to temper the idea that this company has to have some earthshaking event every 15 minutes.
Mark V. Hurd
The more I use a matrix, the easier I make it to blame someone else.
Mark V. Hurd
The more accountable I can make you, the easier it is for you to show you’re a great performer.
Mark V. Hurd
Our job is to execute.
Mark V. Hurd
I have to put people in the right spot so that if they execute, we win.
Mark V. Hurd
I really don’t want the best people at the highest cost.
Mark V. Hurd
We have, of course, all of our Oracle technologies in our cloud. But I don’t think you’re going to see customers wanting to deal with 50 clouds or 40 clouds or anything like that.
Mark V. Hurd
CIOs have to be able to lay out a clear path in concert with the business leader – I used to make the business guy responsible for the apps and force them to answer the question of why they feel they need non-standard apps when they know that’s how the costs skyrocket.
Mark V. Hurd
CIOs have earned a strategic seat at the table, but now they’ve got to hold that seat – and the only way they can do that is to converse in the language of business value and business benefits and business outcomes that all align perfectly with the strategic agenda of the company.
Mark V. Hurd
From a productivity standpoint, you’re supposed to reduce headcount on par with declining revenue. If you believe the environment isn’t going to improve, you should take a bigger cut to get in front of the problems.
Mark V. Hurd
I’ve been lucky to be at companies that have been at interesting intersections at the time I’ve been able to run them and lead them.
Mark V. Hurd
I’m old, I’m used to crummy service, I’m trained to get crummy service. To me, the fact I can get through to a call centre and then hold for 15 minutes, I don’t get that upset. My kids won’t. They want to know the answer to their question now. As a company you have to provide an answer to that consumer.
Mark V. Hurd
I like to have a team environment where I can go anywhere and not threaten management.
Mark V. Hurd
We make a significant effort at Oracle to focus the organization on making customers successful in how they deploy Oracle technology and transform their business through IT.
Mark V. Hurd
There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.
Mark V. Hurd
Customers want to talk to other customers.
Mark V. Hurd
References drive the industry.
Mark V. Hurd
Most tech companies do one trick and die. If you can do two or three or four, that’s where wealth gets created.
Mark V. Hurd
My day starts at 4:30 A.M., and I sort of have two speeds: fast and stop.
Mark V. Hurd
I grew up in New York City, and I moved to Florida in high school.
Mark V. Hurd
I have a wife who’s a great mom.
Mark V. Hurd
It’s tough to reenter the work force.
Mark V. Hurd
At its core, HP has the best technologists on the planet Earth.
Mark V. Hurd
Like it or not, at HP we are technologists, not executive compensation consultants.
Mark V. Hurd
Executives need ample flexibility to respond to the market. That means both reducing costs and increasing innovation.
Mark V. Hurd
For the most part, earnings and market value growth are a result of reduced expenses.
Mark V. Hurd
It’s counterproductive to lower my price, because I have to sell more units to make up for that lost revenue. Generating brand-new products can take a long time. Improving service is typically the quickest way that I can take market share. So aligning technology strategy to better service customers becomes an essential path to revenue growth.
Mark V. Hurd
Cloud represents the maturation of the IT industry.
Mark V. Hurd
Not everyone is comfortable with being pushed.
Mark V. Hurd
I like being pushed.
Mark V. Hurd
I like being part of teams that go into things that people don’t think are doing very well and getting into them to do better.
Mark V. Hurd
When you’re a leader at any level of any scale, leaders are defined at times of crisis.
Mark V. Hurd
Everyone wants to lead when things are going well.
Mark V. Hurd
In times of crisis, you just have to bear down and lean on your own instincts and your own beliefs and make decisions.
Mark V. Hurd
In the pros, tennis is all about individuals. In college, it’s getting individuals to make points for the team.
Mark V. Hurd
It’s important to know when your work is done.
Mark V. Hurd
CEOs can stay too long.
Mark V. Hurd
I go all over the place. I do like the ability to go around the company at different levels to find the people that have the actual answers to the question.
Mark V. Hurd
When I was at Teradata, I got called a growth guy. And then when I became C.E.O. of the whole company, I got called a cost-cutter. Then, I came to H.P. and became an operations guy.
Mark V. Hurd
To be very blunt, I am not really that concerned with what labels get associated with somebody.
Mark V. Hurd
When I left HP, I thought about sitting it out for a while.
Mark V. Hurd
Oracle will continue to componentize all of its solutions so we can work in a heterogeneous environment.
Mark V. Hurd