Richard Kinder Quotes
101 Richard Kinder Quotes (Kinder Morgan, Rich Kinder, Richard D Kinder)
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Corporate graveyards are littered with companies and leaderships that had great vision but didn’t know how to execute.
Richard Kinder
Whenever you hear someone say ‘I’m just a big picture person’ or ‘I don’t understand or pay attention to details,’ that’s not a stock you want to invest in…
Richard Kinder
You can’t get any place if you don’t have the mechanism in place to measure your success or failure.
Richard Kinder
[In 2007] I’ve always believed that if a business model can’t be simply summed up in about a paragraph it’s probably not going to work.
Richard Kinder
The bigger an organization gets, the harder it is to make certain that you’re getting unfiltered, intellectually honest observations and opinions.
Richard Kinder
You need to make sure everybody gets credit … that’s extremely important to me.
Richard Kinder
You can’t set objectives that depend on other things. You have to set objectives on things you can control.
Richard Kinder
You must have specific objectives that everybody buys into and ensure they understand those objectives from day one.
Richard Kinder
I think a little differently…
Richard Kinder
[In 2010] You won’t see any ball parks named after us or corporate jets…
Richard Kinder
Our mantra is that Kinder Morgan is a company run by owners for owners.
Richard Kinder
I don’t think anybody begrudges somebody who has created wealth for a lot of people and have made a lot of money for themselves.
Richard Kinder
I work for $1 a year… so if this company does well, I do well, but if it doesn’t, I don’t. My interest is about as aligned as you can be with that of a shareholder.
Richard Kinder
You have to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.
Richard Kinder
I’ve learned an awful lot by reading a lot of biographies.
Richard Kinder
Do everything you can to follow your own passion.
Richard Kinder
[In May 2006] We’re not a complicated company to understand. We’re just a gigantic toll road. We just get paid a fee to move products, and we don’t care what gets moved down the highway.
Richard Kinder
[In 2002] We believe that management and unitholders’ incentives should be aligned. To that end, I am one of the lowest-paid CEOs of any major company in America.
Richard Kinder
[In 2005] As I’ve said many times, we don’t build or expand assets, or make acquisitions just to get bigger. We only undertake such projects when we have satisfactory commitments in place to ensure an adequate return on our investment.
Richard Kinder
I have always said, we won’t grow just to get bigger.
Richard Kinder
[On the attitude in Enron] Let’s not be smoking our own dope.
Richard Kinder
[On Kinder Morgan] If I have any regrets it’s that this whole growth story has been too much a ‘Rich Kinder’ story, and it’s really not. We have a great, deep management here.
Richard Kinder
[On quitting Enron in 1996 when he was passed over as CEO and Ken Lay won a five year extension of his Chairman/CEO role.] I want to be doing something where I’m running my own show.
Richard Kinder
[In March 2001 on Kinder Morgan] We are not a trading company. We are a midstream asset company: pipe, storage and terminals. It’s an unsexy, dirty business. It’s not rocket science.
Richard Kinder
[On his most important leadership lesson in June 2010.] The most important probably is to always live by that old saying… ‘There’s no limit to what can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.’
Richard Kinder
Try to build a ‘we’ organization and not an ‘I’ organization.
Richard Kinder
There’s not such thing as disengaged leadership.
Richard Kinder
Whenever you hear someone say ‘I’m just a big picture person’ or ‘I don’t understand or pay attention to details,’ that’s not a stock you want to invest in… that’s not a leader you want to follow.
Richard Kinder
I think you have to be very involved in whatever project you’re leading.
Richard Kinder
You have to make sure the credit is shared with everybody and you have to try to measure what your results are.
Richard Kinder
You have to walk a fine line between understanding what is going on in the business and yet give your senior people the ability to run the show.
Richard Kinder
[In June 2010] We have five major business segments, any one of which would be a good sized company on its own. The five segments are our natural gas pipelines, our products pipelines, our 180 terminals around the country, our CO2 operations, and our Canadian pipelines — each headed by an individual president.
Richard Kinder
[On having five individual company presidents each running one of their five major business segments.] They’re responsible for running those individual businesses but my job and the job of the rest of the corporate senior staff is to allocate capital. They need to justify their financial needs through us.
Richard Kinder
[On what it takes to run a great company.] There are three things and it takes all three. You’ve got to have a strategic vision, financial excellence and operational excellence. All three of those things are absolutely necessary.
Richard Kinder
In 1900, there was probably a great company that manufactured buggy whips — and they were great, they were making money, they were efficient in producing the buggy whips, but they failed to foresee Henry Ford and the internal combustion engine and the buggies would be out of style years later… so that was the lack of strategic vision.
Richard Kinder
You can make money and you can have good strategic vision, but if you can’t operate your assets sufficiently, you’re not going to survive very long.
Richard Kinder
[In June 2010 on what he looks for in hiring a senior executive.] You’ve got to have some reasonable amount of intelligence… You have to have a really great work ethic… And then the third thing you have to have is intellectual honesty.
Richard Kinder
The world is too complicated to not have intelligent people…
Richard Kinder
FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt] said, ‘Success is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.’
Richard Kinder
Look for people who are prepared to tell you what’s really going on and to speak their minds freely. This is one of the biggest problems as an organization gets bigger…
Richard Kinder
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