Chief Executive Officers

"As a founder and CEO, you’ll be pulled in a million different directions at once. Without a game plan for the day, quarter, or year ahead, you’re bound to be a slave to your inbox, the Slack chats, calls, coffees, and speaking opportunities you field on a daily basis"

"It’s incredibly important for a CEO to have the whole plan in her head which is very different than her to-do list."

"I’m always a little bit of a sucker for a challenge"

"Africa could be the best place on earth, but instead our best and brightest minds are leaving the continent in the millions."

"Given this assumption, a woman has to divert her attention from her career to the children"

"Every function earlier used to report to Marc (Marc Benioff, founder & CEO of Salesforce). There was no India head. Going forward, the functional reporting will remain, but there will also be an India-reporting structure. India’s scale is unprecedented; if you have solved for the scale in India, you’ve solved a lot of problems globally.These are the synergies we want to bring about"

"You have to be very nimble and agile on your feet to acquire the latest technology, which the private sector could do much more easily than the public sector"

"So I think the merit of a director lies in being able to ask the right questions and being satisfied that the questions are being answered in as complete a manner as possible. Developing that can take a little time, can actually take up quite a bit of your time, especially in the beginning as you get to know the company"

"Everyone I talk to say there is now a different way of doing business. And that cannot really be done unless you are empowered with data, empowered with digital platforms and applications. Depending upon how we are in that journey, what are the resources required, the organisation will decide. But we did want to destress our people by saying that in this entire crisis period, you don’t have to keep worrying about that (layoffs). Just worry about keeping yourself and your family safe."

"I made two-year sabbatical for child and elderly care that could be taken by the employee in three slots. And about two years after we did a survey to see the success of the initiative, we found about 676 women had availed it and one of them even told me that due to this change my entire career has been saved"

"It is expected out of the mother to take the child around for various coaching classes and to wake him (or her) up in the morning with a hot cup of Complan (milk)"

"it’s not going to be the same as mine... you’ll have multiple careers and you need to be able to unlearn, relearn, keep learning all the time. So, when I got the Salesforce opportunity, I told myself that I’ve been giving a lot of gyaan, a lot of advice. Here was a chance to do it myself, to have multiple careers"

"I have done a few things with Fortune 500 firms, and those have gone well. I have led the digital initiatives in SBI and I realise the value of digital. By bringing me in, they want to display the fact that they are serious about India. It indicates a commitment from the Salesforce management that we are here for good and we want to scale this"

"If people ask me what special policies we have to encourage women, we actually don't have any special policies for women. The only special thing we do is to create that environment where women feel confident that it is on the basis of their merit that they will rise"

"I think organisations are doing a lot. First of all, what most organisations now in India are doing is encouraging more and more women to join the organisation. Secondly, they are creating a very merit-oriented environment which means that people are confident. Women are confident that if they put in the hard work and they are capable enough, they will get their rightful move in the organisation"

"I think in order to empower our women we need 3Es. Encourage them, educate them and empower them economically. What I mean by this is first of all, in society, we have to inspire all our girls and women to aspire to do well. Aspire to dream big and aspire to back it up with hard work. Secondly, we must ensure education for all women because it is normally believed when you educate a man, you educate a person but when you educate a woman, you educate the entire generation"

"I believe in fate but I also believe that hard work and diligence plays a very important role in our lives. In a larger sense, we all write our own destiny. Take destiny in your own hands, dream of what you want to achieve, and write it in your own way. As you go ahead in life, I want you to climb the path to success one step at a time. Aim for the sky, but move slowly, enjoying every step along the way. It is all those little steps that make the journey complete"

"I have pursued my career as an independent professional with utmost honesty, dignity and integrity. I continue to have faith and belief in my conduct as a professional and I am certain that truth will ultimately prevail"

"As you go forward, you will sometimes have to take difficult decisions, decisions that others might scorn at. But you must have the courage to stand up for what you believe in. Make sure you have that conviction to do what you know is right, and once you have it, don't let skeptics distract you from your path"

"Therefore ensuring education for all women is very important. The third one is that we have to empower them economically, by providing them the right skills, by providing them access to jobs, by providing them access to markets - basically all opportunities and requisites to enable them to participate in the economic growth"

"I used to tell them that in your time, you will have many careers. And one of the things you should be passionate about is learning, unlearning and relearning, and that’s what the new world is going to be like. When this position was offered to me, I thought of walking the talk"

"When I get whatever I've set my heart on - whether it is a mandate we must win or a person I wish to hire"

"Win. Win. Win. I have a huge passion to win. I feel we tend to make excuses because we haven’t set our mind to win. Whatever it is that you do in life, you need to be in the top three"

"I am a people person. So whenever I engage, whether it’s a client or my own team, for me it’s not just about the work or task at hand. It is about knowing the person and what drives him"

"They have the philanthropic model of 1-1-1, which is giving away 1% of your time, 1% of your products and 1% of your profit or equity to philanthropic initiatives"

"The disinvestment boom is not on her front burner. I have a clear focus on the bottom line"

"The biggest things I learned were that there is so much work to be done in Africa and that Africans must help themselves. We can no longer afford to rely on rich countries to provide us with foreign aid. It’s the person who the shoe pinches who knows how it needs to be adjusted."

"That is exactly what power means to me - getting things done"

"I am utterly disappointed, hurt and shocked by the decision. I have not been given a copy of the report. I reiterate that none of the credit decisions at the bank are unilateral. ICICI is an institution with established robust processes and systems which involve committee based collective decision making with several professionals of high calibre participating in the decision making"

"I have served at ICICI for the last 34 years with all my dedication and hard work. I have never shied away from taking tough decisions whenever required to be taken in the best interest of the organisation. This decision from the bank has caused me immense hurt and pain"

"Aarti, there is no limit to what a determined mind can achieve, but in achieving your goal, don't compromise on the values of fair play and honesty"

"Don't cut corners or compromise to achieve your dreams. Remember to be sensitive to the feelings of people around you. And remember, if you don't allow stress to overtake you, it will never become an issue in your life"

"Remember that good times and bad times will be part of your life equally, and you have to learn to handle both with equanimity. Make the most of life's opportunities and learn from every opportunity, and challenge that life brings along"

"Women are very strong but while a lot of women join the organisation, it’s also equally important for them not to give up and continue through that biggest life stage point where they start their families"

"For the specific life stage needs, at least what the ICICI has done is that we have created a whole programme where women can actually work from home over a longer period and not lose out on their career progression. We have also started this thing where if women who have children up to 3 years of age, travel overnight for work, we pay for the accompanying child and the accompanying caretaker. I think these are the things that need to be done to really meet that specific life stage need"

"India still fares much better than many countries in the world. It's a wide spectrum - there isn't another country where you have 100 million families impacted by the self-help groups of which 85% are women"

"Women having it tougher than men in their careers isn’t anything new globally. Female professionals, especially in India, rarely experience smooth linear progress"

"There are three times when a woman decides to leave (her career), the most common of them being the childbearing years"

"When [Musk] and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I'm immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App"

"I made multiple leaps where there were no guarantees that I was going to be successful, By the way, I was not always successful. But I think if you go into something new with an open mind, and you let people around you know what you don't know, for the most part they're going to link arms with you."

"So if you are somebody who is not afraid of risk and you love the creative process, it's great," she said. "Why would you not do it?"

"I see many, many young women now — and that's part of what excites me about the startup world — who have left great jobs and said, 'I think I can build something,'" "Eighty percent of them will probably fail at it, but they'll learn a ton, and they'll either be much better when they go back into a corporate job or they'll start a second company and they'll succeed. That's the way that we learn. We learn by making mistakes."

"If you genuinely want to have a multifaceted career that takes you into multiple industries, then I think you have to be willing to fail."

"Because it's one of the great jobs," in a recent interview for Business Insider's podcast, "Success! How I Did It."

"We started with the critical early work necessary to prioritize the safety of our users—especially children, and to restore advertiser confidence"

"This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform"

"Nobody retires from these jobs. You will be fired at some point."

"One of the most interesting aspects of working in this industry, and one that never gets old, is the consumer buy in. It’s much easier to measure buy in through sales reports. But, when it comes to grassroot events, forecasting turnout is always an unknown. For us, our first Target in-store event"

"India bourse head was a 'puppet' of unnamed yogi, regulators say,14 February 2022"

"As we know, senior leaders often seek informal counsel from coaches, mentors or other seniors in this industry which are all purely informal in nature. In a similar strain I felt that this guidance would help me perform my role better"