Notable Quotables

Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own.

- Dale Carnegie

The story about GE that hasn’t been told is the value of an informal place. I think it’s a big thought. I don’t think people have ever figured out that being informal is a big deal.

- Jack Welch

Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today’s world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.

- Jack Welch

I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.

- Larry Ellison

Market the change; be bold. Remember don’t be a bad ad, be a good one.

- David Novak

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution. It just needs clarity.

- Ben Horowitz

Keep the big picture in mind. There are always opportunities and possibilities, and thinking too small can negate a lot of them.

- Donald Trump

The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you.

- Peter Thiel

If into the security recordings you go, only pain will you find.

- Yoda

Younglings, younglings gather ’round.

- Yoda

Seeds of discouragement cannot take root in a grateful heart.

- Joel Olsteen

For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.

- Dale Carnegie

There are men in the world who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as others from success.

- Winston Churchill

Getting every employee’s mind into the game is a huge part of what the CEO job is all about. Taking everyone’s best ideas and transferring them to others it the secret. Nothing is more important.

- Jack Welch

It was definitely kind of surprising to see us come out and run the ball because we usually like to pass to start the game and put up some quick points. But tonight, we had real good balance offensively. We ran and passed the ball well, which kept them off balance all night.

- Jack Taylor

How much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes?

- Peter Thiel

I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a might 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.

- Og Mandino

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they’re not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.

- Bill Gates

The residential leasing market remained robust with expatriates from the banking and financial sectors continuing to be the major source of tenant demand for luxury properties on Hong Kong Island.

- Lee Shau Kee

The courage take tough yes-or-no decisions. Look, the world is filled with gray. Anyone can look at an issue from every different angle. Some smart people can –and will-analyze those angles indefinitely. But effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information.

- Jack Welch

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

- Elon Musk

Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts … genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation … the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality …though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]

- Winston Churchill

Stand by your principles and be comfortable with confrontation. So few people are, so when the people with the red tape come, it becomes a negotiation.

- Travis Kalanick

People development should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on.

- Jack Welch

For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

- Bill Gates

It’s not how far you fall. But how high you bounce that counts.

- Zig Ziglar

How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?

- Seth Godin

a greater way. Take a few minutes every day to dream big dreams; close your eyes, and envision your dreams coming to pass. Envision yourself out of debt. Envision yourself breaking that addiction. Envision your marriage being more fulfilled. Envision yourself rising to new levels in your career. If you can establish that picture in your heart and mind, then God can begin to bring it to pass in your life.

- Joel Olsteen

Too often, sales reps simply regurgitate their presentations and expect to land the sale. It doesn’t work.

- Harvey Mackay

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.

- Bill Gates

When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.

- Peter Thiel

Leaders who are kind of insecure or egocentric, they basically sabotage themselves.

- John C. Maxwell

I’m so optimistic, I’d go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take the tartar sauce with me.

- Zig Ziglar

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

- Oscar Wilde

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

- Joel Olsteen

There is always plenty of capital for those who can create practical plans for using it.

- Napoleon Hill

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

- Peter Drucker

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, someway, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

- Joel Olsteen

A lot of people feel very good about Mitt Romney and I think he’s going to do a great job.

- Donald Trump

Search engine optimization is essentially about obtaining admission to an event in which you are competing. Getting invited to compete in the event has no bearing on how you do within the competition itself, but you don’t get to play in the game unless you are on Page 1 of Google search results.

- Clay Clark

If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.

- Rupert Murdoch

Look at the product pipeline, look at the fantastic financial results we’ve had for the last five years. You only get that kind of performance on the innovation side, on the financial side, if you’re really listening and reacting to the best ideas of the people we have.

- Steve Ballmer

The employees who share innovative ideas may also be the folks who have some hidden talents that would help incorporate their suggestions.

- Harvey Mackay

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

- Steve Jobs

The market … demands a signal from you that you’re serious, powerful, accepted, and safe.

- Seth Godin

The Internet will help achieve friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.

- Bill Gates

When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren’t very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.

- Ben Horowitz

Be ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise,’ and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime – repeat them years after you have forgotten them.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.

- Steve Martin

I don’t know how you can justify leaving any engagement behind in the social Web of 2011.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I don’t know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.

- Sam Walton

There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training. Therefore, training should be the most basic requirement for all managers in your organization. An effective way to enforce this requirement is by withholding new employee requisitions from managers until they’ve developed a training program.

- Andrew Grove

If you are a leader, you should never forget that everyone needs encouragement. And everyone who receives it – young or old, successful or less-than-successful, unknown or famous – is changed by it.

- John C. Maxwell

Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.

- Tadashi Yanai

STARTUP THINKING New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, 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). 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. 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. This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

- Peter Thiel

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

- Elon Musk

I will be liken to the rain drop which washes away the mountain; the ant that 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 attemps, repeated will complete my undertaking.

- Og Mandino

Risk, to some, is a bad thing, because risk brings with it the possibility of failure. It might be only a temporary failure, but that doesn’t matter so much if the very thought of it shuts you down. So, for some, risk comes to equal failure (take enough risks and sooner or later, you will fail). Risk is avoided because we’ve been trained to avoid failure.

- Seth Godin

I think my father is nearly perfect. I think he’s quite handsome, except a bit fat.

- Gina Rinehart

You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do. Once you decide, you should immediately execute the reorg: Don’t leave time for leaks and lobbying.

- Ben Horowitz

I love cities, and I love city governments in particular. But in politics it would have taken me 8 years from implementing a policy before I would get to see the feedback. With programming I could model the same policies and see the impact immediately. Technology is a far more efficient way to test.

- Jack Dorsey

There was a moment when I was watching Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in ‘Badboys’ that I felt, you know, inspired. I don’t know if I was proud, because so many people do the work. Everyone’s part of a team that develops over the years and gives people chances. There have been some good moments watching people develop.

- Russell Simmons

I went online with winelibrary.com in July of 1997. That was my first professional online play

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Success must never be measured by how much money you have.

- Zig Ziglar

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.

- Winston Churchill

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

- Warren Buffett

You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.

- Larry Ellison

If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them—not that they are working for you.

- Sam Walton

I have mentioned before that financial intelligence is a synergy of accounting, investing, marketing and law. Combine those four technical skills and making money with money is easier.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Yields will rise with prices, and this will generate steady income.

- Lee Shau Kee

When Sam feels a certain way, he is relentless. He will just wear you out. He will bring up an idea, and we’ll discuss it and then decide maybe that it’s not something we should be doing right now or ever. Fine. Case closed. But as long as he is convinced that it is the right thing, it just keep coming up week after week – until finally everybody capitulates and says, well it’s easier to do it than to keep fighting this fight. I guess it could be called management by wearing you down.

- David Glass

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

- Elon Musk

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it….

- Thomas Edison

Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.

- Peter Drucker

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

- Napoleon Hill

Companies such as Echelon are poised to help drive this change with Cisco and extend the power of the Internet from business to the home.

- John Chambers

Count your blessings. Once you realize how valuable you are and how much you have going for you, the smiles will return, the sun will break out, the music will play, and you will finally be able to move forward the life that God intended for you with grace, strength, courage, and confidence.

- Og Mandino

Networking is one of the most powerful tools you can use to grow your company and reputation.

- Business Insider.com

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

- Jeff Bezos

Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.

- Ben Horowitz

I’m in the shoe business. Look at these things. They’re called Tigers. I faked out the company. I’m the US distributor. Come with me.

- Phil Knight

Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.

- Napoleon Hill

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

- Bill Gates

A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today.

- Peter Thiel

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