When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.
- Michael Otto
Notable Quotables
We’re extremely adroit at hiding our fear. Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we’re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.
- Seth Godin
I work hard, I eat fishballs and noodles. I drink coffee and tea from a street vendor. I am quite casual about personal wealth, life hasn’t changed at all.
- Lui Che Woo
I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.
- Phil Knight
You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.
- Winston Churchill
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
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.
- Bill Gates
Abe Lincoln once remarked that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- Dale Carnegie
The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
- George Orwell
We are pleased to report the 33rd consecutive quarter of revenue and earnings growth. We are especially pleased with the balanced growth rate across almost all countries in both Europe and the Americas.
- John Chambers
If you think about computing, there isn’t just one way to compute, just like there’s not just one way to move around. You can have shoes, you can have a car, you can have a bicycle, submarine, rocket, plane, train, glider, whatever. Because you have one doesn’t mean you get rid of another one… But PCs continue to be important.
- Michael Dell
Don’t go in and tell somebody else how to run their business.
- Carl Icahn
This proves our strategy is working in terms of the convergence of voice, video and data.
- John Chambers
Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn’t there. He took over the project, and it was really my own opinion — only my opinion — that he wanted to compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out.
- Steve Wozniak
There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
- Sam Walton
If you believe as I do that you were born to win, you’re going to have to find your fears and start facing them.
- Zig Ziglar
The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.
- Seth Godin
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
- Bill Gates
To build a successful business, you must start small and dream big.
- Aliko Dangote
Personally, I just hope that my family keeps getting bigger and bigger. That would make me very happy.
- Lee Shau Kee
Positive thinking will let you use the ability which you have, and that is awesome.
- Zig Ziglar
It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
- Warren Buffett
It is not your aptitude but your ATTITUDE that decides your altitude in life.
- Zig Ziglar
Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
- Peter Thiel
Don’t go into the new year holding a grudge from last year. Leave the hurts and disappointments behind.
- Joel Olsteen
Essentially, whoever is successful, whoever is going to do things that make a difference, is going to be talked about.
- Mukesh Ambani
Good action today will produce good living tomorrow.
- Zig Ziglar
I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement.
- Donald Trump
After its return to China, Hong Kong has become an inseparable part of this large country by exerting its business strengths to become a vital member of the country and developing its four pillar industries, namely finance, commerce, shipping and professional services.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.
- Peter Drucker
For me, it’s a purity thing about the joke itself. It’s a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that’s a legitimate item you have there. For me, it’s nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It’s just not what I’m in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.
- Jerry Seinfeld
It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.
- Reed Hastings
Resposibility is the price of greatness.
- Winston Churchill
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
- Zig Ziglar
Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.
- Dale Carnegie
The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier.
- Bill Gates
When Steve Jobs was at NeXT, he was really getting his head together and taking control and becoming the person that, when he came back to Apple, you know, he was ready to really run the company and keep control of things and watch what was being done and develop new products secretly that were really incredibly great.
- Steve Wozniak
Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.
- Howard Schultz
You’ll never achieve real success unless you like what you’re doing.
- Dale Carnegie
It enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.
- Peter Thiel
I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be a matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality. The eff …
- Andrew Carnegie
I don’t think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds you know, building their brands, whereas Virgin is already well-known around the world.
- Richard Branson
Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.
- Bill Gates
Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.
- Clayton M. Christensen
The first dollar is the most you will get if you don’t love what you are doing.
- Ray Kroc
There’s a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.
- Reed Hastings
Uncontrolled Desire For Something For Nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
As Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.
- Jack Welch
Don’t romance Wall Street. You don’t want investors who are only concerned about the quarter, or who are working on their exit strategy from day one. You want shareholders to own you forever. If we have no trading at all, I consider that a tremendous accomplishment.
- Warren Buffett
Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?
- Rupert Murdoch
30 MAJOR CAUSES OF FAILURE: – Napoleon Hill (on leadership and management)
- Napoleon Hill
Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
- Dale Carnegie
If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.
- Jeff Bezos
Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.
- Napoleon Hill
Life is not a portfolio: not for a startup founder, and not for any individual. An entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well. Less obvious but just as important, an individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve.
- Peter Thiel
At the end of the day, effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible. They give people a clear sense of the direction to profitability and the inspiration to feel they are part of something big and important.
- Jack Welch
There are ways of fighting for your interests. I never do something in business that I wouldn’t do in life.
- Vladimir Potanin
How you see your future is much more important than what happened in your past.
- Zig Ziglar
Microsoft’s an important partner for Dell, an important company in the industry.
- Michael Dell
Bitcoin is mostly about anonymous transactions, and I don’t think over time that’s a good way to go. I’m a huge believe in digital currency… but doing it on an anonymous basis I think that leads to some abuses, so I’m not involved in Bitcoin.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft
- Bill Gates
MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once.
- Peter Thiel
Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.
- Sergey Brin
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
- Henry Ford
Athletic skills are acquired over a long period of time and after countless hours of practice.
- Zig Ziglar
What’s dangerous is not to evolve.
- Jeff Bezos
Foreplay, cuddling – a Jedi craves not these things.
- Yoda
Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
- Winston Churchill
Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.
- Peter Thiel
Taking complete ownership of your outcomes by holding no one but yourself responsible for them is the most powerful thing you can do to drive your success.
- Gary Keller
The Obama representatives like Robert Gibbs attack people viciously, but people like me will not be silent and will answer them back.
- Donald Trump
Unleash the power of people. No involvement means no committment.
- David Novak
The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.
- Peter Drucker
May the Force be with you.
- Yoda
The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.
- Jack Ma
I do think that religion has turned a lot of people off. Part of it is because it was all about the rules and was political. I think now people have a hunger for God, they want to have a relationship, but they don’t want to be called religious. I’m not trying to get them to join my religion, I’m just trying to plant a seed of hope in their heart.
- Joel Olsteen
Formal education will make you a living, self-education will make you a fortune.
- Jim Rohn
I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
- Winston Churchill
The depth of your spirit will determine the height of your success.
- Zig Ziglar
You can’t jump to vegan if you’re not. Some people are absolute. Some people are able to be gradual.
- Russell Simmons
The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.
- Russell Simmons
Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.
- Ray Kroc
Worrying about the past or the future isn’t productive. When you start chastising yourself for past mistakes, or seeing disaster around every corner, stop and take a breath and ask yourself what you can do right now to succeed.
- Harvey Mackay
Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it’s about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it’s less than one ton. It’s an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.
- Bill Gates
The Buck Stops Here
- Harry Truman
My biggest wish is for government, the private sector and all of us to work together to make the Philippines the best tourism destination in Southeast Asia.
- Henry Sy
People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.
- Walt Disney
For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.
- James C. Collins
Leaders who are kind of insecure or egocentric, they basically sabotage themselves.
- John C. Maxwell
Hong Kong is uniquely positioned as the best place to integrate with the fast-growing Pearl River Delta Region and to capitalize on the opening up of China’s economy and markets.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I’ve got the greatest job in the world. There’s no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people’s lives. It’s a great challenge.
- Michael Bloomberg
Being great at everything is not an actionable message.
- Floris Maljers
Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.”
- Bill Gates
A magnificent blueprint, a loyal team and a well-coordinated organization… the same applies from ruling a country to maintaining a family.
- Cheng Yu-tung
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into smaller manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
- Mark Twain
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.
- Andrew Carnegie
If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!
- Michael Gerber
You will never fulfill your destiny doing work you despise.
- John C. Maxwell
Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.
- Zig Ziglar
Now that we had a name, we had to have a trademark for the side of the shoe. It was 1971, and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million, so I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State, and there was a woman there saying, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money for the dress for this prom,’ And I said, ‘I have a job for you.’ I paid her $2 an hour, and she spent 17 and a half hours. So $35 and she came up with what is now the swoosh.
- Phil Knight
