In many places where coffee is grown, deforestation is a major issue. With Starbucks’ position in the marketplace and the respect and relationships we have, we can – and have, in some cases – been able to educate and influence people.
- Howard Schultz
Notable Quotables
Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.
- Richard Branson
On an opponent:”He loves the working man. He loves to see him work.
- Winston Churchill
I’ve always been fascinated by cities and how they work.
- Jack Dorsey
True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller
Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
- Napoleon Hill
I want to change history, do something important in my life, and influence individuals like we have with millions of small businesses on Alibaba. Then they love and respect you because you made their life important.
- Jack Ma
Great music and art are earthly wonders, but I think ‘cubist’ songs and paintings are hideous.
- Thomas Edison
[On signing up Michael Jordan in 1984 when he was just 21 years old] We could see that he was a charismatic guy who jumps over the moon and is very competitive, but nobody could have predicted what he would become to our culture.
- Phil Knight
Europe has always represented a major strategic opportunity to achieve our goal of creating and building an enduring global brand.
- Howard Schultz
There is one weakness in people for which there is no remedy. It is the universal weakness of LACK OF AMBITION!
- Napoleon Hill
There’s no single company in the whole world that has a big-scale production base and at the same time has screening and distribution channels. Wanda Group is the first one in the world.
- Wang Jianlin
What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”
- James C. Collins
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
The future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed.
- William Gibson
For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.
- Peter Thiel
With comedy, you have no place to go but more comedy, so you’re never off the hook.
- Steve Martin
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
- Winston Churchill
TV is a great big megaphone,” and when you can only afford to spend dozens of dollars acquiring a new customer, you need the biggest megaphone you can find.
- Peter Thiel
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.
- Henry Ford
Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an ever smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.
- Winston Churchill
With the right pitch, you’ll get no argument. This is where the salesmanship comes in…It requires of you a substantial degree of self-confidence to pull it off, but your belief in your own project will help you muster that.
- Michael Levine
I totally understand that people are upset about it and I think that is a reasonable point of view to take.
- Sergey Brin
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
- Mark Twain
If you will lie about the little things, before long you’ll lie about bigger things.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Concentration is my motto – first honesty, then industry, then concentration.
- Andrew Carnegie
Key to helping poor is to not be poor.
- Abraham Lincoln
Lo que una persona diga de ti no define quién eres. Su opinión de ti no determina tu dignidad propia. Deja que eso te resbale como si fuera agua sobre el plumaje de un pato. Esa persona tiene todo el derecho a tener una opinión, y tú tienes todo el derecho a pasarla por alto.
- Joel Olsteen
Vince McMahon is one of the greatest storytellers of all time, but WWE’s not striving for the kind of innovation it’s capable of.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Now that we had a name, we had to have a trademark for the side of the shoe. It was 1971, and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million, so I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State, and there was a woman there saying, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money for the dress for this prom,’ And I said, ‘I have a job for you.’ I paid her $2 an hour, and she spent 17 and a half hours. So $35 and she came up with what is now the swoosh.
- Phil Knight
Whenever a company proudly announces the establishment of its beautiful, new, modern corporate headquarters, you can be sure it’s heading downhill. Why? Because instead of focusing on their business, the company’s managers are focusing on themselves. Messy desks, cramped quarters and unlovely surroundings are the physical manifestations of people too busy getting the work done to care much about their own creature comforts. The greatest danger to a business is not risk. It’s a lack of risk: complacency.
- Harvey Mackay
Plan and execute your first failure so that you no longer have to fear it.
- John C. Maxwell
In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.
- Peter Thiel
You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.
- Bill Gates
When I cut the feet out of my pantyhose that one time, I saw it as my sign. I had been visualizing being self employed prior to this happening. It was my mental preparation meeting the opportunity in that moment.
- Sara Blakely
You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‘See if you can blow this out.’
- Jerry Seinfeld
In the Networked Age, we’re all like the little kid from The Sixth Sense. If you’re not seeing networks when you enter a room, you might want to check your pulse.
- Reid Hoffman
My son is trying to be a sports writer, and my daughter is a college student. She wants to be a comedy writer, and she’s at film school. I discouraged both of them early on from getting involved in Starbucks. I didn’t think it would be fair; plus, they didn’t have any interest anyway.
- Howard Schultz
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
- Richard Branson
Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.
- Peter Thiel
I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
- Steve Martin
If salespeople don’t probe well for background information, they don’t know how to launch the presentation.
- Jerry Vass
Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started ‘Wine Library TV.’ They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
My parents really wanted me to get out of New York, be exposed to other people, other ways of life.
- Howard Schultz
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
- Henry Ford
I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.
- Larry Page
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
There are many different kinds of PCs. You have fixed, virtual, tablets, notebooks, ultrabooks, desktops, workstations. What you find in commercial PCs, business PCs, is that there’s a really long tail of usage on client devices.
- Michael Dell
Danger: if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!
- Winston Churchill
People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.
- Mark Zuckerberg
I think that people will always want music; I think that the form that they will get it in, or distributed to them from, and the price they pay for it is what’s up in question.
- Ronald Perelman
Relationships are leverage. If you give value to someone else first, you have leverage.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Often, organizations need bold, grand gestures to galvanize people towards a new mission or refocus their attention.
- Howard Schultz
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
- Marc Benioff
The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.
- Seth Godin
My mother taught me something at a young age – she said ‘you are the company you keep’. To define yourself by some label or some level of resources – that’s pretty shallow.
- Howard Schultz
Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.
- Jeff Bezos
I like money, but it’s never been about the money.
- Jerry Seinfeld
If geek means you’re willing to study things, and if you think science and engineering matter, I plead guilty. If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.
- Bill Gates
Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will be doing things absolutely differently from everybody else.
- Sara Blakely
It is possible to know all there is to know about a subject—medicine, for example—but if you don’t have M.D. at the end of your name, few will listen. The M.D. is what I term a credibility indicator.” The so-called expert with the most credibility indicators, whether acronyms or affiliations, is often the most successful in the marketplace, even if other candidates have more in-depth knowledge. This is a matter of superior positioning, not deception.
- Timothy Ferriss
The fastest and best way to build value for your business is to build your people
- Clay Clark
Anyone working for a big company might be skeptical that a large business, or even a strictly online business, can form the same kind of friendly, loyal relationship with customers as a local retailer. I’m saying it’s already been done because I lived it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
- Warren Buffett
It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.
- Dale Carnegie
A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.
- Donald Trump
Fortunately we’re not a public company – we’re a private group of companies, and I can do what I want.
- Richard Branson
There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.
- Bill Gates
We cannot start over, but we can begin now, and make a new beginning.
- Zig Ziglar
Often we don’t even realize who we’re meant to be because we’re so busy trying to live out someone else’s ideas. But other people and their opinions hold no power in defining our destiny.
- Oprah Winfrey
The [Henderson] Group possesses substantial recurrent income.
- Lee Shau Kee
When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.
- Seth Godin
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there.People will follow.
- Seth Godin
Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, knowing him was like drinking it.
- Winston Churchill
But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’
- Zig Ziglar
If you learn to pray bold prayers… it allows God to do big things in your life.
- Joel Olsteen
The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.
- Bill Gates
I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The future is sooner and stranger than you think.
- Reid Hoffman
My kids probably started drinking coffee in their late teens.
- Howard Schultz
If we are growing we are always going to be outside our comfort zone.
- John C. Maxwell
Many salespeople feel that selling is warfare: the buyer is the enemy and words are ammunition…The seller’s advances are turned aside because they are so predictable, amateurish and easily deflected.
- Jerry Vass
It was the right thing to do.
- Phil Knight
Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more.
- Sam Walton
The world has changed – through technology, through wine-making techniques, the quality of wine is greater than it’s ever been. Whereas ten, fifteen years ago it was very easy to find lots of bad wine, it’s kind of hard now. The technology, the science – it’s like, are you kidding? We’re in the golden years of wine!
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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
Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
- Peter Drucker
Feel the force!
- Yoda
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
I believe that continued strong consumer acceptance of our products at retail and the strengthening of our organization will enable us to manage through the challenges in our U. S. footwear business and lay the foundation for another round of growth.
- Phil Knight
Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.
- Henry Ford
The team with the best players wins.
- Jack Welch
People will always blame the poets for society’s ills. But these are the true artists.
- Russell Simmons
You’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
- Peter Thiel
So the challenge, as you contemplate your next opportunity to be boring or remarkable, is to answer these two questions: (1) “If I get criticized for this, will I suffer any measurable impact? Will I lose my job, get hit upside the head with a softball bat, or lose important friendships?” If the only side effect of the criticism is that you will feel bad about the criticism, then you have to compare that bad feeling with the benefits you’ll get from actually doing something worth doing. Being remarkable is exciting, fun, profitable, and great for your career. Feeling bad wears off. And then, once you’ve compared the bad feeling and the benefits, and you’ve sold yourself on taking the remarkable path, answer this one: (2) How can I create something that critics will criticize?
- Seth Godin
I’m optimistic about the country. I’m optimistic about the American people.
- Howard Schultz
Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.
- Rupert Murdoch
Teaching Fire a LessonFire is hot. That’s what it does. If you get burned by fire, you can be annoyed at yourself, but being angry at fire doesn’t do you much good. And trying to teach the fire a lesson so it won’t be hot next time is certainly not time well spent.Our inclination is to give fire a pass, because it’s not human. But human beings are similar, in that they’re not going to change any time soon either.
- Seth Godin
