The best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.
- Peter Drucker
Notable Quotables
My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.
- Winston Churchill
Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true – it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair.
- Vladimir Potanin
We were trading things before we were using language to communicate.
- Jack Dorsey
You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse.
- Elon Musk
Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.
- Yoda
You must not ever think that anything is common sense.
- Clay Clark
Bury your mistakes.
- Rupert Murdoch
Looking? Found someone you have, eh?
- Yoda
MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.
- Reid Hoffman
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.
- Peter Thiel
In tennis, you strike a ball just after the rebound for the fastest return. It’s the same with investment.
- Masayoshi Son
We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.
- Dale Carnegie
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
To be sure, real differences of opinion existed between the groups. Compared to pro-life participants, pro-choice participants had more favorable personal attitudes toward the pro-choice issues and less favorable attitudes toward the pro-life issues, and vice versa.
- John Chambers
Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.
- Napoleon Hill
An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
- Jack Welch
Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.
- Napoleon Hill
Japanese businesspeople and companies are lacking in individuality.
- Tadashi Yanai
This has been a very positive test for Kawasaki.
- Yoda
When you start a company, you’re basically jumping off a cliff. You don’t have any sense of where you’re going to land, what to do when you land, or what you should be doing inmidair. It’s very very scary. But it’s much easier when you have somebody to commiserate with you who knows what you’re going through, and who you know will always be on your side.
- Seth Goldman
It will be disastrous when a leader or manager shows up with one attitude one day and treats people with a different attitude the next day.
- Zig Ziglar
If you pay people peanuts, you will get monkeys.
- Andy Pearson
Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.
- Peter Drucker
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
- Warren Buffett
You are going to survive. And good things are going to start to happen again. And one day you are going to look back and this will not even be such a bad thing.
- Dale Carnegie
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
I use the iPhone and iPad every day, and I no longer touch PCs at all.
- Masayoshi Son
You can learn from everybody.
- Sam Walton
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
- Steve Jobs
Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.
- Jack Ma
Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.
- Bill Gates
The worst way of flying, I think, is standby. It never works. That’s why they call it standby. You end up standing there going, ‘Bye!’
- Jerry Seinfeld
In business, just the opposite is often true; silence means dissent. Have you ever been in a meeting where you sense there is obvious disagreement, but the disagreement never really gets put on the table? This what I call the Slow No’s.
- David Novak
The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company. What do they do with the money? In a financialized world, it unfolds like this: • The founders don’t know what to do with it, so they give it to a large bank. • The bankers don’t know what to do with it.
- Peter Thiel
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
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
If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.
- Seth Godin
I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.
- Og Mandino
If it didn’t happen in your life before, then you’re not paying attention you don’t think it’s possible. But almost all important events never happen in your life before.
- Ray Dalio
We saw – we conducted the experiment. I mean, it’s been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.
- Larry Ellison
Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
- Peter Thiel
Dig your well before you’re thirsty.
- Seth Godin
We believe that the business system only is the key to success. It’s no miracle, only day-to-day work in the appropriate way.
- Alexei Mordashov
NO PURCHASE SHOULD EVER BE MADE IN A BUSINESS UNLESS IT IS JUSTIFIED BY AN INCREASE IN SALES.
- Robert Kiyosaki
I’ve been very lucky. I come from a very close family.
- Richard Branson
Key to helping poor is to not be poor.
- Abraham Lincoln
If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.
- John C. Maxwell
In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.
- Dale Carnegie
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
- Warren Buffett
Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.
- Michael Gerber
DAY FOURTEEN I DECLARE that I will use my words to bless people. I will speak favor and victory over my family, friends, and loved ones. I will help call out their seeds of greatness by telling them I’m proud of you, I love you, you are amazing, you are talented, you are beautiful, you will do great things in life.” This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret.
- George Soros
A girl child who is even a little bit educated is more conscious of family planning, health care and, in turn, her children’s own education.
- Azim Premji
I spent a disproportionate amount of my time in a car in L.A. I’m 35 years old. If you add up the hours spent in cars, it would be years.
- Travis Kalanick
I love doing a lot of things I’m told I can’t do. I think that’s what drives me and keeps me awake every day.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
I try to create businesses that I think are not hurtful.
- Russell Simmons
Unrelenting confidence was necessary.
- Ben Horowitz
Over three hundred years ago Galileo said: You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.
- Dale Carnegie
It seems like a good cause. I’ve been watching it on TV and, it makes me want to help.
- Ed Clark
You’re going to go through tough times – that’s life. But I say, ‘Nothing happens to you, it happens for you.’ See the positive in negative events.
- Joel Olsteen
The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn’t always where you want to use it, and it isn’t always when you want to use it.
- Bill Gates
When you come in to court as a plaintiff or as a defendant, it is terribly important that you look up at the bench and feel that that person represents you and will understand you, that that person is reflective of our community and of our society.
- Michael Bloomberg
India has rapidly risen to become a major force in the global economy.
- John Chambers
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there.People will follow.
- Seth Godin
Twitter was around communication and visualizing what was happening in the world in real-time. Square was allowing everyone to accept the form of payment people have in their pocket today, which is a credit card.
- Jack Dorsey
You can expect what you accept.
- Anonymous
A business that looks orderly says to your customer that your people know what they’re doing.
- Michael Gerber
God always wants us to be growing.
- Joel Olsteen
We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
[On working at Nike for 48 years] In those 48 years, I have never had a promotion. but it had its other benefits.
- Phil Knight
But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it’s a lie and they’re protected if the person’s famous or it’s a company.
- Steve Wozniak
We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
- Peter Drucker
Intemperance.
- Napoleon Hill
How you see your future is much more important than what happened in your past.
- Zig Ziglar
The bigger we get as a company, the more important it becomes for us to shift responsibility and authority toward the front lines, toward the department manager who’s stocking the shelves and talking to the customer. When we were much smaller, I probably wasn’t as quick to catch on to this idea as I do should have been. But as an avid student of management theory, back in the mid-seventies I started reading the work of W. Edwards Deming, the famous statistician who taught so much to the Japanese about improving their productivity and competitiveness.
- Sam Walton
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.
- Bill Gates
Keeping score is for games, not friendships.
- John C. Maxwell
Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.
- Winston Churchill
I will everyday as just a blow from my blade against a mighty oak…strike until it falls quote.
- Og Mandino
Comprehensive after-sale property management service is as important as building quality.
- Lee Shau Kee
Why does a 67-year-old guy who got his start running an athletic shoe company think he can enter a field famous for gobbling up fortunes.
- Phil Knight
Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it’s taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, ‘Let’s get out the camera and get that shot.’ You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.
- Bill Gates
Advertising is to a genuine article what manure is to land, – it largely increases the product.
- P.T. Barnum
Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.
- Peter Thiel
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
CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it.
- Jack Welch
We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.
- Walt Disney
Who’s your Jedi master? WHO’S your Jedi Master?
- Yoda
The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.
- Phil Knight
I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun.
- Reed Hastings
Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.
- Napoleon Hill
Show a real interest in his problem and helping him solve it.
- Jack Nadel
What did I do that was right—and in what way could I have improved my performance? What lessons can I learn from that experience?
- Dale Carnegie
You have to be a crazy guy and a little eccentric to be very successful.
- Tadashi Yanai
I like to get people fired up, fill them with zeal for McDonald’s, and watch the results in their work.
- Ray Kroc
I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system. Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly.
- Steve Wozniak
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
- Warren Buffett
Never surrender opportunity for security.
- Branch Rickey
Building solid relationships in business is about helping others succeed and moving their efforts forward. This benefits both parties. Relationships are built easily, naturally, and profitably when you focus on helping the other party…
- 2014)
