Clearly, as a CEO, you have other functions that are managed by other people.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Notable Quotables
Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.
- Peter Thiel
It’s flattering to people who stop you and say that you’ve helped them and all. But, again, you know, you’ve got to stay humble because as quick as you came up, you can come down.
- Joel Olsteen
Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better.
- Peter Thiel
If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
- Timothy Ferriss
The premium single-cup segment is the fastest-growing business within the global coffee industry.
- Howard Schultz
Keeping score is for games, not friendships.
- John C. Maxwell
John, never lend money to your friends; it will spoil your friendships.
- John D. Rockefeller
The single reason for a salesperson’s existence is to get the Buyer’s commitment. Just how poor are salespeople at their jobs? In a study of professional sales people (those who sell full time), 50% failed to ask for the buyer’s commitment to buy.
- Jerry Vass
People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.
- Howard Schultz
In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can’t you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that’s different from a California textbook that’s different from a Massachusetts textbook. That’s very expensive.
- Bill Gates
One who knows God is going to bless them, despite the fact that they have no idea how to actually raise capital or solve a real problem that people have in exchange for monetary compensation. They love the idea of business ownership, yet fear working, as though doing any actual work or rendering any tangible service or product might ruin their lives on this planet and for eternity.
- Clay Clark
When I was growing up my dad would encourage my brother and me to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, so what did you guys fail at this week? If we didn’t have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he’d high-five me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn’t the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, I didn’t try that because I was scared, that is failure.
- Sara Blakely
Culture is one of the most precious things a company has…So you must work harder on it than anything else.
- Herb Kelleher
Life is too short for long-term grudges.
- Elon Musk
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
- Peter Drucker
Our leaders in business, politics, research, and the arts are all great salespeople or they have great sales people on their payroll.
- Jerry Vass
You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.
- Jim Rohn
In creating an ideavirus, the advertiser creates an environment in which the idea can replicate and spread. It’s the virus that does the work, not the marketer.
- Seth Godin
The timing of your decision is just as important as the decision you make.
- John C. Maxwell
If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.
- Peter Thiel
Well, I am a Republican, and I would run as a Republican. And I have a lot of confidence in the Republican Party. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the president. I think what’s happening to this country is unbelievably bad. We’re no longer a respected country.
- Donald Trump
Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.
- John C. Maxwell
At the age of 30, one can overcome difficulties. By the age of 40, one has thorough appreciation of and insights into the world and becomes firmly self-assured without being carried away by all those irregularities in life.
- Cheng Yu-tung
If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.
- Seth Godin
The important thing about outsourcing or global sourcing is that it becomes a very powerful tool to leverage talent, improve productivity and reduce work cycles.
- Azim Premji
Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.
- Winston Churchill
In the journey of entrepreneurship, tenacity of purpose is supreme.
- Aliko Dangote
You have enough people against you… be for yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
I’m an Urban Scholar.
- Michael Ward
When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.
- Thomas Edison
I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.
- Warren Buffett
My husband is such a healthy eater. Except when it comes to sweets. He never consumes anything except fruit until noon. And then from noon on he might have some brown rice and some tofu, and then, come eight or nine at night, he orders three mud-pie double-chocolate pieces of cake and eats all three of them.
- Sara Blakely
the expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back
- Dale Carnegie
Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.
- Steve Ballmer
The most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?
- Peter Thiel
When you try to do something big its hard to fail completely.
- Timothy Ferriss
I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it’s really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it.
- Steven Spielberg
Many residents have grown more cynical about government, … Sure, I want my constituents to feel good about me as their legislator, but we have to do something to restore the public’s faith in government.
- Michael Gerber
When plans appear into your mind, they will probably flash into your mind through the sixth sense, in the form of an inspiration. This inspiration may be considered a direct telegram, or message from infinite intelligence. Treat it with respect, and act upon it as soon as you receive it. Failure to do this is fatal to your succeess.
- Napoleon Hill
Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.
- Winston Churchill
You can’t win by being more average than average.
- Seth Godin
I’ve always been interested in science – one of my favourite books is James Watson’s ‘Molecular Biology of the Gene.
- Bill Gates
It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
- Winston Churchill
Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.
- James C. Collins
Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.
- Rupert Murdoch
The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.
- Bill Gates
Catering to a mass audience usually backfires. Instead the key thing is to stay in your lane, and if you are good enough and interesting enough, people move to you…If you never compromise, your core audience will come with you as you grow. Then you build on their loyalty and bring in other people.
- Russell Simmons
If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.
- Elon Musk
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
It is hard to realize today that “government” during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln’s Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not “executives” and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.
- Peter Drucker
That’s the true spirit of Christmas, people being helped by people other than me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
A good idea is never lost. Even though its originator or possessor may die without publicizing it, it will someday be reborn in the mind of another….
- Thomas Edison
You will give birth to more in the future than you’ve lost in the past.
- Joel Olsteen
The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.
- Mark Zuckerberg
We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend.
- Peter Thiel
The first ten minutes of sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die.
- Timothy Ferriss
We have secured the rigs necessary to complete our program, a program that focuses on more development activity and less risk. The current forecasted activity level calls for 391 wells, with increased activity in each region including expanded drilling on each of the acquisition plays purchased in 2005.
- Dan Dinges
One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness upon the part of the leader to do more than he requires of his followers.
- Napoleon Hill
Be honest, always.
- Jack Dorsey
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
- Seneca
I don’t need you to be funny. I don’t want to be entertained.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Learn to speak God’s favor over every area of your life. Remember, the more favor-minded you are, the more of God’s favor you’re going to experience.
- Joel Olsteen
Listening is just as important in one’s home life as in the world of business.
- Dale Carnegie
The time has come to act.
- Theodore Roosevelt
God will not pour fresh, creative ideas and blessing into old attitudes.
- Joel Olsteen
I had this very rich sense of how the metropolis was living and breathing.
- Jack Dorsey
This is an addictive pastime. You take no real risk, touch the world, and it responds. Repeat.
- Seth Godin
Don’t take anyone for granted.
- Jack Dorsey
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.
- Sam Walton
Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money, non-monopolists can’t.
- Peter Thiel
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
- Bill Gates
Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.
- Steve Ballmer
They don’t call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.
- Larry Ellison
Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
- Dale Carnegie
I believe that uncertainty is really my spirit’s way of whispering, I’m in flux. I can’t decide for you. Something is off-balance here.
- Oprah Winfrey
Profitability is a shallow goal if it doesn’t have a real purpose, and the purpose has to be share the profits with others.
- Howard Schultz
To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.
- Clayton M. Christensen
The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake- you can’t learn anything from being perfect.
- Adam Osborne
Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle…
- Napoleon Hill
Speeches will not distribute the future.
- Jack Dorsey
I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.
- Oprah Winfrey
What you sow you reap. What you give.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Extolling the virtues of conservation of energy, Churchill advised, “Never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie down.
- Winston Churchill
There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Just as ships are built to sail the seas and planes to fly the heavens, so is man created for a purpose.
- Zig Ziglar
At first, we couldn’t be establishment, because we didn’t have any money. We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we’ve had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned.
- Phil Knight
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
- Bill Gates
They did not die because of sickness or anything but because of hunger. I remember that and how people suffered.
- Lui Che Woo
Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
- Peter Thiel
You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.
- John C. Maxwell
It may look impossible, but God can do the impossible. Just because you don’t see anything happening doesn’t mean God is not working.
- Joel Olsteen
You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
- Walt Disney
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
- Winston Churchill
The 1990s have a good image. We tend to remember them as a prosperous, optimistic decade that happened to end with the internet boom and bust. But many of those years were not as cheerful as our nostalgia holds. We’ve long since forgotten the global context for the 18 months of dot-com mania at decade’s end.
- Peter Thiel
Fatigue makes fools of us all. It robs you of your skills and your judgment, and it blinds you to creative solutions. It’s the best-conditioned athlete, not the most talented, who generally wins when the going gets tough.
- Harvey Mackay
When growth is slower-than-expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher-than-expected, bonds go down. When inflation is lower-than-expected, bonds go up.
- Ray Dalio
Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Accordingly, a ‘genius’ is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.
- Thomas Edison
