Notable Quotables

The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.)

- James C. Collins

People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.

- Peter Drucker

The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don’t have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.

- Ben Horowitz

We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.

- Larry Page

The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.

- Bill Gates

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

The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.

- Winston Churchill

Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.

- Elon Musk

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

- Elon Musk

Children astound me with their inquisitive minds. The world is wide and mysterious to them, and as they piece together the puzzle of life, they ask ‘Why?’ ceaselessly.

- John C. Maxwell

If you want to build a dynasty, you need to always be focused on getting better and beating last year’s performance in everything you do. You want to eliminate peaks and valleys, what we call boom, splat, and go for a good steady incline.

- David Novak

America, for me, is the country where, if you have something great to offer, you’ll be valued highly.

- Tadashi Yanai

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

- Bill Gates

Be careful not to compromise what you want most for what you want now.

- Zig Ziglar

There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.

- Bill Gates

[Luke:] I can’t believe it. [Yoda:] That is why you fail.

- Yoda

The Overseas Chinese habit is to save a lot and make a lot of friends.

- Lee Shau Kee

My own center, my Kingdom Center, which is the highest priced tower in Saudi Arabia, was vacated twice because of terrorist attacks, terrorist threats.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.

- Zig Ziglar

People have been indoctrinated so completely by their jobs that they don’t want to know how something works, they’re willing to accept that perhaps the laws of nature don’t work as they expect, and by the way, can I have the remote?

- Seth Godin

There are two types of people in the world. One type is known as leaders and the other as followers. Decide at the outset whether you intend to become a leader in your chose calling or remain a follower. The difference in compensation is vast. The follwer cannot reasonably expect the compensation to which a leader is entitled, although many followers make the mistake of expecting such pay.

- Napoleon Hill

Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.

- Winston Churchill

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

- Zig Ziglar

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

- Peter Drucker

Ow, ow, OW! On my ear you are!

- Yoda

You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.

- Harry Truman

When you’re green, your growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.

- Ray Kroc

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.

- Henry Ford

If you will focus on meeting other people’s needs, God will always make sure your needs are supplied. God will take care of your problems for you.

- Joel Olsteen

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

- Jeff Bezos

What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

- Elon Musk

There will be no pissing on partners in the shower.

- Phil Knight

If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

- Elon Musk

We have an average household net worth of $3.7 million. Of course, some of our cohorts have accumulated much more. Nearly 6 percent have a net worth of over $10 million. Again, these people skew our average upward. The typical (median, or 50th percentile) millionaire household has a net worth of $1.6 million.

- Thomas J Stanley

Twitter has been my life’s work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what’s going on in them right now.

- Jack Dorsey

If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.

- Thomas Edison

I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it’s useless, I think it’s a distraction.

- Seth Godin

Japan’s biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.

- Tadashi Yanai

Here’s how I work: It’s 2013, and most marketers are operating like it’s 2009. I’m always trying to market like it’s 2015, but not like it’s 2020. A lot of my contemporaries who understand where the world is going, go too far out, and aren’t practical. I have always prided myself on being visionary, with a heavy practicality.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

[On someone with a new idea.] The first thing is to draw it out, program it, play with it and get other people playing with it so you can get feedback right away… Once you get that feedback you know if it’s something you should pursue and give more of your attention to, or if it’s something you should put on the shelf for another da

- Jack Dorsey

The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.

- Winston Churchill

Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve.

- Dale Carnegie

At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun ‘at work’ and getting paid for it!

- Zig Ziglar

It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

- Ben Horowitz

If you look at coffee, tea, food and juice, we think there are inherent opportunities. If you look at health bars or grab-and-go products that are in our stores, we think we can significantly enhance them and make them more widely available.

- Howard Schultz

Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.

- Zig Ziglar

Canon is basically a very aggressive company. Our company works on competitive principles. It does not treat people equally, but it does treat them fairly.

- Fujio Mitarai

Unless you choose to do great things with it, it makes no difference how much you are rewarded, or how much power you have.

- Oprah Winfrey

Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First he gets up everyday bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever know. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction. (qualities of great leaders)

- David Glass

Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.

- Seth Godin

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike”, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.

- Seth Godin

Bordeaux would be naive not to recognize that Robert Parker was driving the brand equity. If the next generation doesn’t care about Chateau Pichon-Lalande, then you have a problem.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The regulatory systems in place disincentive innovation. It’s intense to fight the red tape.

- Travis Kalanick

A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.

- Robert Kiyosaki

You’ll never rise any higher than the way you see yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

The doctors actually told my family there was a five percent chance of me living.

- Ed Clark

People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don’t like change. A bunch of people don’t like the Olympics now because we’ve added skateboarding… We’re modernizing the sport.

- Larry Ellison

I think people will walk into the Starbucks store and overnight recognize the significant difference between what Starbucks represents day-in and day-out and all the other coffee companies that have been serving coffee in India for so many years.

- Howard Schultz

The most stable companies have strong leaders at every level of the organization. The only way to develop such widespread leadership is to make developing leaders a part of your culture. That is a strong part of Coca-Cola’s legacy.

- John Maxwell

To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas, and focusing on the essentials.

- Richard Branson

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

- Michael Otto

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

- Tadashi Yanai

For myself I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use to be anything else.

- Winston Churchill

A company needs lots of smart, super-engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them.

- Ben Horowitz

Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): “If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war”.Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war.

- Winston Churchill

I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It’s got the market. It’s got consumer confidence and it’s got banks throwing – I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.

- Jack Welch

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

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

- Napoleon Hill

If you don’t plan your time, someone else will help you waste it.

- Zig Ziglar

Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.

- Ben Horowitz

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

- Steve Jobs

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

- Winston Churchill

When you have no one to answer to, vendetta as investment strategy is as legitimate as anything.

- Carl Icahn

Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.

- Steve Ballmer

Foreplay, cuddling – a Jedi craves not these things.

- Yoda

We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.

- Bill Gates

It marks a big step in a man’s development when he comes to realize that other men can be called in to help him do a better job than he can do alone.

- Andrew Carnegie

I started thinking about joy. Everything in our society is so purposeful. Let’s bring joy back to the experience.

- Sara Blakely

There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?

- Warren Buffett

One reason to buy a watch (or a book) is because you want to possess it, show it off, give it to your grandchildren. Holding a book is a luxury, one for which you pay a premium.

- Seth Godin

Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.

- Ben Horowitz

When Pat Holt strings together a list of words not to overuse—“Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally”—she’s not being a stickler for formality and grammar. Instead she’s reminding us that words matter, that poor word use is just a red flag for someone who wants to ignore you.

- Seth Godin

Regarding our links with the Russian government, Severstal is a private company with no government participation. We are answerable to our shareholders.

- Alexei Mordashov

Don’t grow accustomed to living with less, doing less, and being less to the point that you eventually sit back and accept it.

- Joel Olsteen

We live in a culture that relishes tearing others down. It’s ultimately more fulfilling, though, to help people reach their goals. Instead of feeling jealous, remember: If God did it for them, He can do it for you.

- Joel Olsteen

I’m just like so many women – I was frustrated, I had these white pants that I had spent a lot of money on, and you get home and you think, ‘What am I really supposed to wear under this?’ So it was a frustrated consumer moment.

- Sara Blakely

MARCH 1 Envision Your Dreams I counsel you to buy from me . . . salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. REVELATION 3:18 DO YOU LOOK UPON your life with eyes of faith? Think of it this way: when we close our eyes, we should see more than we do when we have our eyes open. See your whole family serving God. See yourself rising to new levels of effectiveness. See yourself stronger, healthier, and living a more abundant life. See God using you in.

- Joel Olsteen

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