Mellody Hobson Quotes

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Mellody Hobson

Profession : Businessman

Birth : April 3, 1969

I honestly think I'm going to rot my brain with all the news. I'm a news junkie.

Mellody Hobson

I think the one thing about the Zoom calls is unlike being in a room with people where you can look away or drift off, I feel like with Zoom, everyone's face is just dead center, head on, there is no drifting. It takes a lot of energy from me.

Mellody Hobson

We don't prognosticate macroeconomic factors, we're looking at our companies from a bottom-up perspective on their long-run prospects of returning.

Mellody Hobson

People feel a great deal of their wealth or lack thereof in their home value. Despite the fact they're living there and not going to sell it per se, it does have a big psychological effect.

Mellody Hobson

You can teach someone with basic smarts to be smarter; you can't teach cultural fit or personality. But you also want someone who has a passion to win; someone that is all in.

Mellody Hobson

A year's worth of Social Security for an individual is not considered to be below the poverty level, and yet we know that would be extraordinarily tough to live on.

Mellody Hobson

On my worst day I always tell myself I'm not in a field picking cotton.

Mellody Hobson

Diverse perspectives lead to a better outcome. There's so much data, when you look at the math, in terms of the investor returns and the shareholder value that gets created from more diverse boards.

Mellody Hobson

I can't tell you how many resumes we get from business schools across the country from black women and black men and Hispanic women, men, etcetera, who say I'm interested in working for your company because they can see someone at the top who looks like them.

Mellody Hobson

If you exclude a group of people from the boardroom or the leadership ranks of a company, the company is not as good as it could be.

Mellody Hobson

I had very big dreams for myself, and I wanted to work really hard, and I wanted to make sure that I didn't leave anything on the field. And that's how I've always lived my life.

Mellody Hobson

I have a strong point of view, and that's a double-edged sword. It can be a phenomenal characteristic in terms of getting things done, but it can also mean I will be relentless in my pushing for my point of view.

Mellody Hobson

I've told stories about people coming to my office and giving me their coats and requesting that I hang them up and get coffee - which I dutifully do. And then I come in and sit at the head of the table. It's awkward.

Mellody Hobson

I've been thought to be a flight attendant many many times.

Mellody Hobson

There's nothing wrong with being help. But it's very wrong that we presume people of colour are in a subservient position. That's problematic.

Mellody Hobson

My mother always wanted me to be in the best environment that I could be in. She wanted me to go to the best schools. Every now and again she'd save up enough for us to get a nice apartment in downtown Chicago, but we were never able to sustain it.

Mellody Hobson

Sometimes those apartments we lived in weren't finished, sometimes the rooms would be heated by the gas stove, sometimes we would heat our water on hot plates to take baths, and that was very sobering, especially as a child.

Mellody Hobson

Sometimes I feel like I could have been a Depression-era person, just because of my need to make sure that I'm conservative in how I think about money.

Mellody Hobson

Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail.

Mellody Hobson

In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes, the one that black people don't like to swim, I'm going to tell you how much I love to swim. I love to swim so much that as an adult, I swim with a coach.

Mellody Hobson