Safra A. Catz Quotes

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Safra A. Catz

Profession : Businesswoman

Birth : December 1, 1961

Let your customers be your partners; let your vendors be your employees. What's necessary in this transformation more than anything else is courage and a willingness to change.

Safra A. Catz

The most significant barrier to female leadership is the actual lack of females in leadership. The best advice I can give to women is to go out and start something, ideally their own businesses. If you can't see a path for leadership within your own company, go blaze a trail of your own.

Safra A. Catz

What happened in the past can help you know what's going to happen in the future. That insight brings a next level of intelligence not just to sales and marketing but to ERP, where you can save more money in procurement or figure out whether the people you recruit are going to be successful in your organization.

Safra A. Catz

A core focus of our effort is based on the recognition that our customers have varying needs, and one of their most important needs is to have choice.

Safra A. Catz

My greatest inspiration is my mother, the bravest person I ever knew. She overcame incredible odds, worked while raising two kids, and made it all look incredibly simple. Even in her final days succumbing to cancer, she fought like a champion.

Safra A. Catz

I know firsthand the complexities of leading an enterprise through business and technology transformation. It takes intense focus, a strong drive, and a clearly communicated vision to inspire and take an organization from where they are, to where they need to be - or where they want to go.

Safra A. Catz

When we do acquisitions, we decide what we want. We decide what fills a hole. And if the price is too high, our alternative is the $5 billion we spend on R&D every year. We're not well-known for overpaying, because at Oracle we always have an alternative.

Safra A. Catz

Hopefully in the future, generational challenges will be measured by achievement, not gender.

Safra A. Catz

In 1986, Microsoft and Oracle went public within a day of each other, and I recall telling one of my colleagues that the software business will become big. So I started working with software companies in the mid-'80s and never turned back.

Safra A. Catz

I come from Wall Street, and you'll never see me do a PowerPoint because I'm all about Excel spreadsheets. If it's not in the numbers, I don't care how strategic it is; it doesn't play out.

Safra A. Catz

I learn from Larry Ellison every day. I've said this before: how is it to work with someone who thinks out of the box? Larry doesn't see the walls at all; he does not see the box. He is an absolute, true visionary. And to be honest, I always find myself in a box! I'm comfy in my box. I've furnished it; it's lovely.

Safra A. Catz

It's critical to simplify and run the business in such a way that resources are released to invest in your main business.

Safra A. Catz

I literally went down to my car and thought, 'Oh my God, SAP bought Concur - maybe tomorrow they'll buy Dairy Queen.' It was the best thing that happened to me on the day I was named CEO of Oracle.

Safra A. Catz

As much as people say they love change, they love it when you change - not when you want them to change. Even when it comes to processes they don't like, they're afraid of change.

Safra A. Catz

Hardware ultimately is a scale game, and it's a differentiation game. If you are literally selling products that are completely undifferentiated, like x86 servers, why would anybody pay you for that?

Safra A. Catz

If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet. Cloud? That's not new; it's a new name.

Safra A. Catz

Netweaver was going to be the number one middleware player in the world. We heard about Netweaver day and night. Oracle became number one. No one talks about Netweaver.

Safra A. Catz

It is not a coincidence that Fusion middleware and applications have the same name. We knew what we needed it to be.

Safra A. Catz

My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning.

Safra A. Catz

The worst decision, hands down, was wearing bright yellow when I was 9 months pregnant. I looked like a bumble bee. I have not worn yellow since.

Safra A. Catz