Business Quotes | Archive - Page 10 of 176

Woody’s Allen’s great line about relationships. A relationship is like a shark, it either has to move forward or it dies. And that’s true about your company.

- Larry Ellison

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. The first month cost perhaps $200 more than if I had been micromanaging.

- Timothy Ferriss

Where there is no vision, there is no hope.

- George Washington Carver

What is Oracle? It’s people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.

- Larry Ellison

A goal properly set is halfway reached.

- Zig Ziglar

It has been almost a decade since the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. Hong Kong has gone through both good times and bad times. During the past decade, Hong Kong has undoubtedly played an increasingly important role in the economic development of China.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Who’s your Jedi master? WHO’S your Jedi Master?

- Yoda

They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.

- Clayton M. Christensen

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

- Dale Carnegie

You don’t have to choose between your business and your life. Rather, if you do it right, you get your business and your life. In fact, we strongly believe that the only way to build a truly scalable business is by radically reducing its reliance on you, the owner, and supporting that rapid growth through systems, team and internal business controls.

- Jeff Hoffman

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

- Bill Gates

We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.

- Ray Kroc

About half of our wives do not work outside the home. The number-one occupation for those wives who do work is teacher.

- Thomas J Stanley

A disagreement or incident involving someone who’s not that important to you, like a guy who cut you off in traffic or a rude cashier, is something that should roll off your shoulders. Save the effort for resolving conflicts with the people you cherish.

- Joel Olsteen

If you have a lot of [visionaries], you’ll have a lot of great ideas, something awesome that people will love; but you never get it done. It doesn’t ship. Nothing happens. If you have too many [execution oriented] people on your team, you’re executing like mad, things are getting built, and you’re shipping like crazy – but you’re building something that nobody wants. If you have a good balance of both in your company, you’re more likely to stay on track. Those people compliment each other.

- Caterina Fake

I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

- Steve Martin

It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great.

- James C. Collins

As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies. At my companies, our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one.

- Elon Musk

You are here today because of a decision you made yesterday.

- Bryan Smith

The most important thing about education is appetite.

- Winston Churchill

The Chinese government still would like to see U.S. Internet companies explore the Chinese market, providing they are willing to abide by Chinese law. I think companies like Facebook should think about the Chinese market.

- Robin Li

For me, my father was, and still is, a symbol of qualified persons in the Ministry of Foreign Trade under Soviet conditions.

- Vladimir Potanin

The most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

- Ben Horowitz

A great accomplishment shouldn’t be the end of the road, just the starting point for the next leap forward.

- Harvey Mackay

I think we are living in a time where the consumer has lots of choices, whether it’s coffee, newspapers or whatever it is. And there is parity in the market place, and as a result of that, the consumer is beginning to make decisions, not just on what things cost and the convenience of it.

- Howard Schultz

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

- Sam Walton

Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

- Peter Thiel

You’re asking somebody who has a wife and is really happily married, ‘So, what’s your next wife going to be like?’ And I’m like, ‘What?

- Travis Kalanick

In business, just the opposite is often true; silence means dissent. Have you ever been in a meeting where you sense there is obvious disagreement, but the disagreement never really gets put on the table? This what I call the Slow No’s.

- David Novak

This is the city of dreamers and time and again it’s the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed.

- Michael Bloomberg

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

- Mark Zuckerberg

I predict at least one of the rookie drivers will win a race this year. With this strong of a group, two or three of them will likely win.

- Ed Clark

Change before you have to.

- Jack Welch

I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.

- Bill Gates

In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up and goes.

- John Erskine

It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.

- Alisher Usmanov

I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I’m not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.

- Jack Ma

If you go to a bad movie, it’s two hours. If you’re in a bad movie, it’s two years.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The first thing I ever invested in was Twitter. Blaine Cook, former CTO, was leaving the company and asked me if I wanted to buy his stock.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I think one of the great dangers here is going and categorizing anybody from one religion as a terrorist. That’s not true… That would let the terrorists win. That’s what they want us to do.

- Michael Bloomberg

There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.

- Winston Churchill

Be factual. Lying is really, really a bad idea, mostly because they’ll find you out. And then you’ll never get another item in that outlet for as long as they remember you, which will be forever.

- Michael Levine

The only time to buy these is on a day with no ‘y’ in it.

- Warren Buffett

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened

- Winston Churchill

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.

- Walt Disney

Often the best way to develop workers – when you are sure they have the character and think they have the ability – is to take them to a deep place, throw them in and make them sink or swim.

- John D. Rockefeller

Ask yourself a question: Is my attitude worth catching?

- Zig Ziglar

I was born in a family with a strong military background, so I chose to be a soldier.

- Wang Jianlin

It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you.

- Ben Horowitz

There’s nothing – I’ve bought everything I want. I don’t like yachts or anything; you know, I’m not a yacht person, and I’ve got pretty much the nicest plane I’d want to have.

- Elon Musk

Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting.

- Peter Thiel

Failures are life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you are off course. Trying new things and not being afraid to fail along the way are more important than what you learn in school.

- Sara Blakely

When we are not engaged in thinking about some definite problem, we usually spend about 95 percent of our time thinking about ourselves.

- Dale Carnegie

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

- Bill Gates

You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That’s about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis.

- Patrick Soon-Shiong

So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work – what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?

- Ray Dalio

Most of the fans have ideas about their perfect phone. But many of them can’t do it because building a phone is tough. So they would give us feedback about the features that they think should be included in our next model. And if we incorporated that in our new phone, they will share the good news with their friends.

- Lei Jun

Today, Andy Quinn pitched a great game finally, and that’s what he’s capable of. He fell behind a few hitters, but he got stronger as he went on.

- Jack Taylor

What has sustained us through these years? Trust. Dedication. Discipline.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

- Andrew Carnegie

MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.

- Winston Churchill

The Loire Valley is grossly underestimated. The prices are fair, and the wines are real.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve.

- Dale Carnegie

Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.

- Peter Drucker

Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.

- Reed Hastings

Don’t treat your customers like a bunch of purses and wallets.

- Chris Brogan

I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.

- Winston Churchill

Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can’t be too worried about what they’re told at their country clubs.

- Rupert Murdoch

Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.

- Ben Horowitz

May the Force be with you.

- Yoda

It doesn’t matter whether you are pursuing success in business, sports, the arts, or life in general: The bridge between wishing and accomplishing is discipline.

- Harvey Mackay

[In April 2013] Being anonymous is an important part of democracy. I think it’s a critical part of democracy.

- Jack Dorsey

Pale ink is better than the most retentive memory.

- Harvey Mackay

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

- Walt Disney

Great foresight is required to run a multinational corporation. A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization are the three indispensable factors, and the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The basis of persistence is the power of will. Men who accumulate, great fortunes are generally known as cold-blooded and sometimes ruthless. Often they are misunderstood. What they have is willpower, which they mix with persistence and place back of their desires to insure that attainment of their objectives. Henry Ford was generally misunderstood to be ruthless and cold-blooded. This misconception grew out of Ford’s habit of following through in all of his plans with PERSISTENCE…few carry on despite all opposition until they attain their goal. Those few are the Fords, Carnegies, Rockefellers and Edisons.

- Napoleon Hill

As the economy shifts, large (and small) organizations are discovering that this brainwashing thing was a huge error. You can’t snooze your way to greatness. You can’t optimize your way to surprising growth. You can’t organize your way into blamelessness.

- Seth Godin

Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?

- Elon Musk

The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

- Bill Gates

It’s my view that solar energy may be the ultimate solution for energy for most of the world. I believe, based on what little I know about it, that there is a possibility of a breakthrough.

- Donald Bren

Every time you walk down the street people are screaming, ‘You’re fired!’

- Donald Trump

Now that we have run out of money we have to think.

- Winston Churchill

People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don’t really believe in it, then they are not going to really work hard.

- Mark Zuckerberg

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.

- Winston Churchill

The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.

- Andrew Carnegie

The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.

- Seth Godin

The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.

- Yoda

I demand pretty aggressive goal setting and a commitment to measured progress towards those goals because I don’t like surprises. I don’t even like good surprises.

- Abigail Johnson

If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on public relations.

- Bill Gates

People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.

- Howard Schultz

Often people fail to start or complete a task because they don’t see any connection between what they’re doing and what they really want to accomplish in life.

- John C. Maxwell

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

- Peter Drucker

This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace.

- Timothy Ferriss

With no clear picture of how you wish your life to be, how on earth are you going to live it? What is your Primary Aim? Where is the script to make your dreams come true? what is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?

- Michael Gerber