Notable Quotables

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now). At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.

- Peter Thiel

Even if we are right and the other person is definitely wrong, we only destroy ego by causing someone to lose face. The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

- Dale Carnegie

Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.

- Wang Jianlin

The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.

- Jeff Bezos

This is not checkers; this is motherfuckin’ chess. Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There is always a move.

- Ben Horowitz

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

Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It’s time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.

- Seth Godin

In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.

- Elon Musk

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative.

- Peter Thiel

True joy comes when you inspire, encourage, and guide someone else on a path that benefits him or her.

- Zig Ziglar

I believe the government of the United States should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply.

- Stephen R. Covey

I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.

- Peter Thiel

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

- Winston Churchill

…[if you] use discrimination in the selection of your Master Mind group, your objective will have been half-way reached, even before you begin to recognize it.

- Napoleon Hill

People tend to over-weigh risks on a personal level. It’s one thing if you’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids to support, so that if you were to deviate from your job, well, how are you going to feed your family and pay the rent? That’s understandable, but let’s say you’re young and you’re just coming out of college, what are your risks? You’re not going to starve, certainly not in any kind of modern economy. It’s so easy to earn enough money just to live somewhere and eat food. Very easy to do. So I don’t know what they’re afraid of. Mostly afraid of failure, I think, but people should be less risk averse, when there’s not much at risk.

- Elon Musk

The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

- Peter Drucker

You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.

- Seth Godin

I was not an easy student, and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons, said Rockefeller, who described himself accurately as reliable but not brilliant.

- John D. Rockefeller

Its never too late…to start heading in the right direction.

- Seth Godin

Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.

- Walt Disney

As a company it is always better for us to work with more customers than fewer customers. The more people that we serve, the more money that we will make.

- Napoleon Hill

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.

- Ben Horowitz

I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household’s income.

- Thomas J Stanley

Plant a seed of greatness in your children. Speak a word of encourgement to someone who needs to hear it. Inspire someone to be a better person. One day you’ll reap a harvest, and your world will become a better place to live.

- George Foreman

If there is to be a low-cost Uber, Uber will be the low-cost Uber.

- Travis Kalanick

True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

- Helen Keller

It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?

- Peter Thiel

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

Certainly there’s a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

- Bill Gates

The local property leasing market generally experienced a slowdown and rental was subject to downward pressure. However, the investment properties of the [Henderson] Group are represented mainly by shopping podiums located in the new towns and these properties were less affected as compared with the retail shopping premises located in the urban areas.

- Lee Shau Kee

Xiaomi looks a bit like Apple but is really more like Amazon with some elements of Google.

- Lei Jun

Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today. I will be likened to the raindrop, which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking. I will persist until I succeed.

- Og Mandino

It partly depends on the currency regimes in place in the country.

- John Chambers

Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn’t an artist, he was a plumber.

- Seth Godin

For many of us, the happiest future is one that’s precisely like the past, except a little better.

- Seth Godin

Its obvious that we don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything.

- Thomas Edison

I always saw myself wanting to do something deemed successful and good at the same time.

- Howard Schultz

Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

- Peter Thiel

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

- Peter Thiel

My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.

- Sara Blakely

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

- Paul Graham

Cherish your visions and dreams as they are the children of your soul. The blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

- Napoleon Hill

By my count, more business leaders have failed and derailed because of arrogance than any other character flaw.

- Harvey Mackay

Passion isn’t project-specific. It’s people-specific.

- Seth Godin

Nobody ever accused me of wisdom of any kind, let alone conventional.

- Phil Knight

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.

- Elon Musk

You’re never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

- Bill Gates

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.

- Ben Horowitz

The purpose of process is communication. If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process, because you can just talk to each other.

- Ben Horowitz

MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped: Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining? Was customer satisfaction rising or falling? What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.

- Ben Horowitz

Entrepreneurs must protect themselves and the venture at all times by documenting your agreements.

- Jack Nadel

I probably have about four or five cups of coffee a day. I make myself an espresso macchiato when I wake, which is a shot of espresso and just a dollop of steamed milk. Then, if I’m going to do some work at home, I would make myself a French press. It’s the best way to make conventional coffee.

- Howard Schultz

An organization takes its cue from the person on top. I always told our business leaders their personal intensity determined their organization’s intensity….For me intensityh covers a lot of sings. If there’s one characteristic all winners share, it’s that they care more than anyone else. No detail is too small to sweat or too large to dream. Over the years I have looked for this characteristic in the leaders we selected. It doesn’t mean loud or flamboyant. It’s something that comes from deep inside. Great organizations can ignite passion….Leaders must have courage to kick ass and break glass.

- Jack Welch

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.

- Michael Jordan

The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.

- James C. Collins

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?

- Winston Churchill

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

- John F. Kennedy

Ohhh. Great warrior.Wars not make one great.

- Yoda

I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.

- Ben Horowitz

Control your temper. Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.

- Dale Carnegie

Encouragement is the fuel on which hope runs.

- Zig Ziglar

It takes a leader to create momentum. Followers catch it. And managers are able to continue it once it has begun. But creating it requires someone who can motivate others, not who needs to be motivated. Harry Truman once said, If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. But for leaders, that statement should be changed to, If you can’t make some heat, get out of the kitchen.

- John Maxwell

The timing of your decision is just as important as the decision you make.

- John C. Maxwell

I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.

- Dale Carnegie

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

- Andrew Carnegie

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.

- Thomas Edison

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

- Henry Ford

Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that’s where charisma comes from, from the leading.

- Seth Godin

We’ve only been wealthy in this country for 70 years. Who said we ought to have all this? Is it ordained?

- Jack Welch

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

- Ben Horowitz

There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything and an optimist who says, Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway. Either way, nothing happens.

- Yvon Chouinard

My store, Wine Library, outsells big national chains. How do you think we do it? It started with hustle. I always say that our success wasn’t due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Show a real interest in his problem and helping him solve it.

- Jack Nadel

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 never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.

- Zig Ziglar

Learning is not done to you, it is something you choose to do.

- Seth Godin

Let us accept the natural order in which we move. Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making – once.

- Winston Churchill

There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.

- Elon Musk

Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.

- Jack Welch

I am more of a creative person. I recognize that about myself, which is why I hired my weaknesses early on. I think if most founders don’t relinquish some control, then we hold back the development of our companies.

- Sara Blakely

In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.

- Bill Gates

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

Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.

- John C. Maxwell

Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission.

- Zig Ziglar

Dell will participate in tablets and all sorts of client devices. Our main business is helping our customers secure, protect their data and access it from any device they want to.

- Michael Dell

A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.

- James C. Collins

Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

- Steve Martin

With residential property prices having dropped by around two-thirds from their peak in 1997 and local interest rates dropping to their historic lows, mortgage payments currently falls below rental payment. This positive carry has led to property purchases by both home purchasers as well as investors. Further, with the local stock market becoming active again and reaching its highest level in the past 17 months, this has resulted in an increase in the number of transactions and a price for the luxury properties.

- Lee Shau Kee

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