Notable Quotables

I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

- Ben Horowitz

Expect to make some mistakes when you try new and different approaches. Sometimes colossal failures lead to spectacular successes.

- Harvey Mackay

I’ve seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all.

- Timothy Ferriss

We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.

- Dale Carnegie

If you will remain at rest and hold your peace, then the battle is not yours, but the battle is the Lord’s.

- Joel Olsteen

While evaluating his future professional opportunities, Gary has chosen to spend some time with his family.

- John Chambers

All of us, in a sense, struggle continuously all the time, because we never get what we want. The important thing which I’ve really learned is how do you not give up, because you never succeed in the first attempt.

- Mukesh Ambani

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

- Jack Dorsey

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

- Henry Ford

There’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.

- Ben Horowitz

As Indian companies strive to be globally competitive, they have realized the importance of investing in information technology and networking to adapt quickly to rapidly shifting market transitions.

- John Chambers

Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.

- Reed Hastings

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

- Winston Churchill

Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice – fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

- Sergey Brin

The entrepreneur builds an enterprise, the technician builds a job.

- Michael Gerber

Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.

- Winston Churchill

I am a former sabre fencer and fenced as part of the Uzbek republic team.

- Alisher Usmanov

I think the positive competition between states in India is one of the most positive dynamics that the country has.

- Bill Gates

A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist.

- Seth Godin

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.

- Bill Gates

It is not good to demonstrate your luxury and your wealth: to rub it in the faces of others is insulting. So you should be modest, try not to insult people by showing that you can do what they cannot.

- Vladimir Potanin

Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.

- Bill Gates

Hong Kong has, throughout it’s history, experienced periods of uncertainties… I believe that the virtues of Hong Kong people – diligent, flexible and entrepreneurial – will once again overcome the obstacles before us.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I wouldn’t ever say if you’re having tough times then there must be something wrong with you or your attitude. Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith. I encourage people to stay up, stay hopeful, stay faith-filled.

- Joel Olsteen

Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

Believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

- Seth Godin

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

- Winston Churchill

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

- Wang Jianlin

I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.

- Oprah Winfrey

Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.

- Jack Welch

Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He’s always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

- Steve Wozniak

Life’s too short to spend it trying to keep others happy. You can’t please everyone. To fulfill your destiny, stay true to your heart.

- Joel Olsteen

If you don’t have a voice that forces you back to basics, you’re a dangerous person. Or to put it another way: You’re at risk, and the people with you are at risk. I’m not a daredevil. I don’t fly without a safety net.

- Stephen Wynn

The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist.

- Zig Ziglar

The Minden prospect originated this past summer through a large acreage acquisition from a major oil company and Cabot now controls 3,500 acres over the area. We are pleased with our initial results and will remain active in this area throughout 2006. On forty-acre spacing, the prospect has the potential for 80 plus locations.

- Dan Dinges

If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

- James C. Collins

Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was… just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But…it was an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since [1945]…. And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.

- James C. Collins

I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: He is nothing but a boy — a little boy!

- Dale Carnegie

We see no major changes in that model for the next several years. In fact, we are more optimistic about Cisco’s position and opportunities in both the enterprise and service provider markets than at any point in the last several years.

- John Chambers

One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful..we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..

- Joel Olsteen

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

- Herb Kelleher

Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.

- Peter Drucker

Always remember, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

- Winston Churchill

My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.

- Michael Gerber

By the end of the war (the civil war) John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags, or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.

- Ron Chernow

In a climate of tight budgets, reduced workforces and stiff competition, internal training can be a great substitute for costly offsite workshops and conferences.

- Harvey Mackay

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

- Steve Wozniak

If a man’s heart is rankling with discord and ill feeling toward you, you can’t win him to your way of thinking with all the logic in Christendom. Scolding parents and domineering bosses and husbands and nagging wives ought to realize that people don’t want to change their minds. They can’t be forced or driven to agree with you or me. But they may possibly be led to, if we are gentle and friendly, ever so gentle and ever so friendly.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m not ashamed of any of my papers at all and I’m rather sick of snobs that tell us that they’re bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants. I doubt if they read many papers at all.

- Rupert Murdoch

We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.

- Walt Disney

Tip 29 – A good Accountant is not just a scorekeeper.

- Jack Nadel

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

- Bill Gates

The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.

- Timothy Ferriss

You don’t have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.

- Michael Dell

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

- Mark Twain

Steve Jobs didn’t really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don’t deny that.

- Steve Wozniak

The profile of homebuyers in Hong Kong is becoming more diverse and a wider range of marketing channels is thus needed to promote the Group’s Hong Kong property projects.

- Lee Shau Kee

I was raised with ‘Laurel and Hardy’ and ‘I Love Lucy’ and Jerry Lewis, and I just loved it. And I had a friend in high school and we would just laugh all day and put on skits. You know, it’s the Andy Kaufman thing or the Marty Short thing where you’re performing in your bedroom for yourself.

- Steve Martin

The Waffle Trainer later became the best-selling training shoe in the United States.

- Phil Knight

I’m not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

- George Soros

The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn’t thought of before and that aren’t talked about in the news all the time.

- Steve Wozniak

Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.

- Peter Thiel

Execution begins with a vision and your people saying, I understand it. I’m excited about it. I can help make it happen.

- David Novak

PRINCIPLE 1 Don’t criticize, condemn or complain. PRINCIPLE 2 Give honest and sincere appreciation. PRINCIPLE 3 Arouse in the other person an eager want.

- Dale Carnegie

College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.

- Peter Thiel

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

- Seth Godin

If my job would have been to sell someone something they didn’t need, I would not have been very good at it.

- Pat McGovern

You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.

- Zig Ziglar

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

- Winston Churchill

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

- Thomas Edison

Forty years ago, Richard Branson, who ultimately founded Virgin Air, found himself in a similar situation in an airport in the Caribbean. They had just canceled his flight, the only flight that day. Instead of freaking out about how essential the flight was, how badly his day was ruined, how his entire career was now in jeopardy, the young Branson walked across the airport to the charter desk and inquired about the cost of chartering a flight out of Puerto Rico. Then he borrowed a portable blackboard and wrote, “Seats to Virgin Islands, $39.” He went back to his gate, sold enough seats to his fellow passengers to completely cover his costs, and made it home on time.

- Seth Godin

We’re better than the rest of the country but we shouldn’t believe it too much.

- Peter Thiel

If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.

- Harvey Mackay

There are some people that can get things done, and it seems there are others who just can’t. That’s why we move heaven and earth to retain our stars and the main reason we manage out our lowest performers – the bottom 10% at least – each year.

- David Novak

At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study.

- Ben Horowitz

The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.

- Oprah Winfrey

Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.

- Peter Thiel

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.

- Matthew 7:12

Determine your destiny or somebody else will.

- Jack Welch

Ask yourself a question: Is my attitude worth catching?

- Zig Ziglar

Fascinatingly, as companies begin to struggle, the third category always seems to grow much faster than the first. In addition, the sudden wave of “semi-performance-related attrition” usually happens in companies that claim to have a “super-high talent bar.” How do all these superstar employees suddenly go from great to crap?

- Ben Horowitz

The possession of a perfect knowledge of your business is an absolute necessity in order to insure success.

- P.T. Barnum

Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

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