People say that globalisation has negative aspects, but I don’t believe globalisation is bad. It’s criticised from a western perspective, but if you put yourself in the shoes of people in the developing world, it provides an unprecedented opportunity.
- Tadashi Yanai
Notable Quotables
The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
- Peter Thiel
If you’ll dare to take your mind off your troubles, get your mind off your own needs and, instead, seek to be a blessing to other people, God will do more for you than you could even ask or think.
- Joel Olsteen
When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.
- Seth Godin
It will change the way we work, live, play and learn.
- John Chambers
Dad never had the kind of ambition or confidence to build much of a business on his own, and he didn’t believe in taking on debt. Sam Walton on the traits that make a great leader. It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Sam Walton
I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn’t been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn’t have been lucky
- Oprah Winfrey
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
I’m just always looking forwards. I spend very little time, looking backwards.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.
- Warren Buffett
Dinner would have been splendid…if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.
- Winston Churchill
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Albert Einstein
When advice is freely given, the receiver is free to use it as he or she sees fit.
- Harvey Mackay
Great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future.
- Peter Thiel
For a successful entrepreneur it can mean extreme wealth. But with extreme wealth comes extreme responsibility. And the responsibility for me is to invest in creating new businesses, create jobs, employ people, and to put money aside to tackle issues where we can make a difference.
- Richard Branson
The great ambition should be to excel all others engaged in the same occupation.
- P.T. Barnum
As kids, we all worked for the company in one way or another. I got to work behind the candy counter or run the popcorn stand when I was five years old. The business was part of life, and it was always included in the dinner conversation. We learned a lot about the debt it took to open new stores, and I worried about it. I remember confiding to my girlfriend one time – crying and saying, I don’t know what we’re going to do. My daddy owes so much, and he won’t quit opening.
- Alice Walton
Anyone who has held an iDevice or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Steve Jobs’s obsession with visual and experiential perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.
- Peter Thiel
Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.
- Ray Kroc
Use money to make money.
- Lee Shau Kee
The story drives the mission.
- Jim Cathcart
Los líderes son vulnerables, no controladores, y nos llevan a un lugar nuevo, no a la seguridad barata, rápida y sumisa.
- Seth Godin
You have to learn to follow your heart. You can’t let other people pressure you into being something that you’re not. If you want God’s favor in your life, you must be the person He made you to be, not the person your boss wants you to be, not even the person your parents or your husband wants you to be. You can’t let outside expectations keep you from following your own heart.
- Joel Olsteen
But this “spray and pray” approach usually produces an entire portfolio of flops, with no hits at all. This is because venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.
- Peter Thiel
Bloodshed, gentlemen, no doubt is lamentable. I have seen some of it–more perhaps than many of those who talk about it with such levity. But there are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extreme scale. . . . The trampling down of law and order which, under the conditions of a civilised state, assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–all this would be worse than bloodshed.
- Winston Churchill
The secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.
- John C. Maxwell
Not victory , Obi- Wan. The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen. Begun, this Clone War has.
- Yoda
I am not the smartest, but I surround myself with competent people.
- Henry Ford
Believe that you will succeed — and you will.
- Dale Carnegie
The great thing is we’re going to have a lot of new facilities, where the others were 10 years old or older. That’s a plus for the fans. The new State Road 20 is going to open. That’s a huge addition for us, probably one of the biggest things that’s happened since we bought the track in 1990.
- Ed Clark
the world belongs to the man or woman who got up today and did something
- Jim Stovall
Pull in your belt, spend less, and reduce debt.
- Ray Dalio
You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.
- Seth Godin
Everybody was writing about computers and electronics, but all I really knew about was running. It’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.
- Phil Knight
I’m a strange mixture of my mother’s curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother’s father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.
- Rupert Murdoch
He had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed.
- Thomas Edison
Where is the love that will overlook a person’s faults?
- Joel Olsteen
This is a learning in the business life that first of all you need to have commitment, dedication and passion for what you are doing.
- Lakshmi Mittal
When I was growing up my dad would encourage my brother and me to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, so what did you guys fail at this week? If we didn’t have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he’d high-five me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn’t the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, I didn’t try that because I was scared, that is failure.
- Sara Blakely
In Hong Kong, the property business has always been very competitive, so we have to think of ways to get an edge over our competitors.
- Raymond Kwok
Life’s a journey. It’s a journey about discovering limits.
- Larry Ellison
Lack of Concentration Of Effort.
- Napoleon Hill
To me, failure means not trying; failure isnt the outcome. If i have to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I didnt try that because I was scared,’ that is failure.
- Sara Blakely
Hedgehog Concept—disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought.
- James C. Collins
Have the humility to learn from those around you.
- John C. Maxwell
Make the decision and say, I’m not letting that worry in. I’m done being upset when my plans don’t work out. I’m not letting that stress in.” Negative thoughts will still come to your mind, but you don’t have to let them into your spirit.
- Joel Olsteen
For now, if the Hong Kong environment doesn’t change, then in the long term, investing in Hong Kong is best.
- Lee Shau Kee
A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.So the question is: Have you ever done that?
- Seth Godin
The ultimate goal for a business owner is to build a company that he or she can one day sell, continue to scale, or even own passively. Most business owners reach for growth by working harder and personally trying to produce more. This is a flawed model that at best will lead to only moderate growth. At worst this strategy can literally put your entire company at risk.
- Jeff Hoffman
There was joy in getting his blood pressure down . . . joy in climbing Mount Everest . . . joy in reaching the summits of six more of the world’s highest mountains . . . joy in building a profitable company providing houses that people could turn into homes . . . joy in learning to fly. But he will also tell you there has been no joy as great as giving from what God has blessed him with so that he might bless and serve others. That’s the true and ultimate purpose of setting and reaching goals.
- Zig Ziglar
Initiative = Happiness
- Seth Godin
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.
- Bill Gates
Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.
- Tadashi Yanai
There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.
- Bill Gates
When men are fighting for their lives they are not often disposed to be complimentary to those who are trying to kill them.
- Winston Churchill
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
Don’t fall in love with your wit. Your cleverly turned phrase may not, as you hope, show off how much gray matter you have, especially if the phrase is at someone else’s expense.
- Harvey Mackay
My natural inclination to be improv rather than an educated character serves me well.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
- James C. Collins
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
Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them.
- Harvey Mackay
People who enjoy what they are doing invariably do it well.
- Joe Gibbs
Unleash the power of people. No involvement means no committment.
- David Novak
Most business people today are not going to invest in the uncertainty that exists in America.
- Howard Schultz
Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.
- Winston Churchill
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
- Bill Gates
Make it just like a Mac.
- Bill Gates
Everything popular is wrong.
- Oscar Wilde
America is built around this premise that you can do it, and there are an awful lot of people who are unlikely to have done it who did.
- Michael Bloomberg
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
- Bill Gates
We are interested in any sector with good growth potential.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
- Walt Disney
Character is to man what carbon is to steel.
- Napoleon Hill
We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.
- Walt Disney
I think the advantage of democracy is that it makes us less dependent on a group of leaders.
- Azim Premji
If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.
- Zig Ziglar
People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
- Andrew Carnegie
I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.
- Bill Gates
Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.
- Larry Ellison
Our international success started out first because we became the No. 1 casual wear brand in our home market of Japan. Then, we set up stores in the world’s major fashion centers of New York, Paris and London.
- Tadashi Yanai
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
I get great satisfaction from both business and philanthropy.
- Donald Bren
But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.
- Peter Thiel
The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization…. Such war-making weapons should be developed – but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation.
- Thomas Edison
Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
How to walk to Cleveland Shipping is an event. There’s life before you ship and then there’s the moment you ship. And then there’s life after you ship. Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still heading toward Cleveland. Keep starting until you finish.
- Seth Godin
Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation…. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!
- Thomas Edison
There are seldom, if ever, any hopeless situations, but there are many people who lose hope in the face of some situations.
- Zig Ziglar
Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.
- Vladimir Potanin
I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment…..the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.
- Peter Drucker
I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.
- Andrew Carnegie
When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.
- Bill Gates
Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.
- Napoleon Hill
Politics and government are certainly among the most important of practical human interests.
- P.T. Barnum
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
If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.
- Phil Knight
We ride roughshod over the feelings of others, getting our own way, finding fault, issuing threats, criticising a child or an employee in front of others, without even considering the hurt to the other person’s pride. Whereas a few minutes’ thought, a considerate word or two, a genuine understanding of the other person’s attitude, would go so far toward alleviating the sting!
- Dale Carnegie
I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.
- John D. Rockefeller
The price of greatness is responsibility.
- Winston Churchill
I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.
- Joel Olsteen
