If you are going to run a successful business you are going to have to be committed to your customers 100% of the time. If customers consistently tell you that they don’t like a certain product or service you offer or an employee that you have working for you, you must be willing to act based upon their feedback if you find it to be factual.
- Clay Clark
Notable Quotables
People were expecting Rouge to go bankrupt, so there was a lot of anxiety. The corporate culture problem was even worse than in Russia. And at the same time, the work rules were more difficult.
- Alexei Mordashov
The expensive act of planning on late When you’re late, there’s not a lot of room for choice or decision or initiative. When you’re late, the path is well lit, and the choices are clear. Run! Run down the path you’ve run down before. Late is a tool for people unable to find the guts to stand for their acts. Late gives us cover; it permits us to trample forward, without creativity or panache. “Can’t you see I’m late!” we shout, as we do what we have to do, without even pausing to think about what we could do instead. Late might be useful, except that late is incredibly expensive. This strategy, the one we choose so we can avoid the fear of choice, costs us in so many ways. It degrades quality, misses airplanes, charges overtime, and shuts down those around us. It’s also exhausting. The alternative to planning on late is to initiate before it’s required, to ship before deadline, to put the idea out there before the crisis hits. This act of bravery actually gives you influence, leverage, and control in a way that planning on late never can.
- Seth Godin
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
- Ben Horowitz
It partly depends on the currency regimes in place in the country.
- John Chambers
A broad trend I’m completely obsessed with is mobile commerce. Like completely. I’m completely convinced that everybody’s going to be buying from their mobile devices. Whoever can claim that space or be in that space, I’m very interested in.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The more we share what’s happening around us, the more we understand how someone lives their life. The greater the understanding we have, the more empathy we have for each other. By and large, that reduces conflicts.
- Jack Dorsey
With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain market share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device. But a lot of those users are frustrated. They can’t type. They can’t create documents.
- Bill Gates
We receive what we believe.
- Joel Olsteen
To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, “It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.
- Winston Churchill
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.
- Steve Jobs
Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.”
- Sam Walton
Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
- Og Mandino
An optimist understands that life can be a bumpy road, but at least it is leading somewhere. They learn from mistakes and failures, and are not afraid to fail again.
- Harvey Mackay
We want to be the most predictable, boring growth company.
- John Chambers
The life of a startup is full of ups and downs, an emotional roller coaster ride that you can’t quite imagine if you’ve spent your whole career in a corporation.
- Harvey Mackay
New customers are silver…loyal customers are gold.
- Anonymous
Any time a company grows as fast as Wal-Mart has, pockets of duplication are going to build up, and there will be areas of the business which we may no longer need. No boss or employee really likes to dwell on such matters; it’s only human nature not to want to have your job, or the jobs of the people who work for you, eliminated. But it is absolutely the responsibility of a company’s top management to be thinking about this issue all the time – to ensure the sound future for the overall company.
- Sam Walton
Throughout this quarter of a century, the entrepreneurial outlook, versatility and vision of our employees have remained the crucial elements of our success…
- Cheng Yu-tung
Satan knows, if you are against YOURSELF you will never fulfill your destiny. :(
- Joel Olsteen
One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.
- Seth Godin
The foundation of success in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune, it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick.
- P.T. Barnum
Plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.
- Peter Drucker
Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.
- Bill Gates
The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.
- Yoda
you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven.
- Timothy Ferriss
Being too humble can cost you. Not talking about your accomplishments can hit you in the pocketbook. It’s those who visibly take credit for accomplishments who are rewarded with promotions and gem assignments, writes Klaus. As our economy has resulted in less job stability, self-promotion has become more important. Even if you aren’t an entrepreneur, says Klaus, you need to think like one and start talking up your most valuable product: you.
- Peggy Klaus
God has already done everything He’s going to do. The ball is now in your court. If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.
- Joel Olsteen
Let’s think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it’s okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea… well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.”
- Elon Musk
Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.
- Bill Gates
Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris.
- Peter Thiel
I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. You have these augmented realities like Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook that provide these virtual nodes and instant feedback from anywhere, adding annotation around a physical places.
- Jack Dorsey
For example, a world without secrets would enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
- Peter Thiel
Anything you’re interested in the world – whether it be Charlie Rose or JetBlue or a public figure or your local coffee shop – they’re on Twitter and broadcasting what is interesting to them.
- Jack Dorsey
It is important for a husband to understand that his words have tremendous power in his wife’s life. He needs to bless her with words. She’s given her life to love and care for him, to partner with him, to create a family together, to nurture his children. If he is always finding fault in something she’s doing, always putting her down, he will reap horrendous problems in his marriage and in his life. Moreover, many women today are depressed and feel emotionally abused because their husbands do not bless them with their words. One of the leading causes of emotional breakdowns among married women is the fact that women do not feel valued. One of the main reasons for that deficiency is because husbands are willfully or unwittingly withholding the words of approval women so desperately desire. If you want to see God do wonders in your marriage, start praising your spouse. Start appreciating and encouraging her. Every single day, a husband should tell his wife, I love you. I appreciate you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” A wife should do the same for her husband. Your relationship would improve immensely if you’d simply start speaking kind, positive words, blessing your spouse instead of cursing him or her.
- Joel Olsteen
Small businesses don’t exist without the nucleus.
- Bryan Smith
Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
- Elon Musk
When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.
- Warren Buffett
When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal; you do not change your decision to get there.
- Zig Ziglar
I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!
- Steve Wozniak
These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.
- Winston Churchill
Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don’t let these feelings stop them.
- T. Harv Eker
Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.
- Napoleon Hill
Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
- Timothy Ferriss
When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone.
- Winston Churchill
Leadership is influence.
- John C. Maxwell
A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.
- Ben Horowitz
Great vision without great people is irrelevant.
- Jim Collins
Good habits are as addictive as bad habits, and a lot more rewarding.
- Harvey Mackay
If your temper is aroused and you tell ’em a thing or two, you will have a fine time unloading your feelings. But what about the other fellow? Will he share your pleasure? Will your belligerent tones, your hostile attitude, make it easy for him to agree with you? If you come at me with your fists doubled, said Wood row Wilson, I think I can promise you that mine will double as fast as yours; but if you come to me and say, ‘Let us sit down and take counsel together, and, if we differ from one another, understand why it is that we differ from one another, just what the points at issue are,’ we will presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the points on which we differ are few and the points on which we agree are many, and that if we only have the patience and the candor and the desire to get together, we will get together.
- Dale Carnegie
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
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
Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money
- Warren Buffett
I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.
- Henry Ford
In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.
- Peter Thiel
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit
- Napoleon Hill
I didn’t think I would come to this conclusion — but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see.
- Sergey Brin
Watered-down feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it’s deceptive and confusing to the recipient.
- Ben Horowitz
I’m a big supporter of President Obama.
- Russell Simmons
Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.
- Sam Walton
I’ve been blessed to find people who are smarter than I am, and they help me to execute the vision I have.
- Russell Simmons
Capitalism works.
- Michael Bloomberg
I am optimistic that we can achieve a better future. It’s not true that the Philippines is a hopeless case.
- Henry Sy
The legacy of Steve Jobs and the strength of Steve Jobs is that he established a company that’s clearly firing on all cylinders and clicking very well.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
He had realized something while arcing in slow circles toward the earth—risks weren’t that scary once you took them. His.
- Timothy Ferriss
You always hear the phrase, money doesn’t buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it’s not really true. I got a new car because the old one’s lease expired.
- Sergey Brin
This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.
- Bill Gates
I’ve seen executives improve their performance and skill sets, I’ve never seen one lose the support of the organization and then regain it.
- Ben Horowitz
There is no such thing as Something for nothing.
- Napoleon Hill
We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that’s something we’re proud of.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Every setback is a setup for a comeback.
- Joel Olsteen
The world got enamored with smartphones and tablets, but what’s interesting is those devices don’t do everything that needs to be done. Three-D printing, virtual-reality computing, robotics are all controlled by PCs.
- Michael Dell
It’s insane to me to ask anybody to be what they’re not. Know what you know the best, love the most. That’s always going to be the answer to the thing that you have the best shot at winning at.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.
- Zig Ziglar
Real entrepreneurs have what I call the three Ps (and, trust me, none of them stands for ‘permission’). Real entrepreneurs have a ‘passion’ for what they’re doing, a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved, and a ‘purpose’ that drives them forward.
- Michael Dell
The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake- you can’t learn anything from being perfect.
- Adam Osborne
In every age there comes a time when a leader must come forward to meet the needs of the hour. Therefore, there is no potential leader who does not have the opportunity to make a positive difference in society.
- Winston Churchill
[In June 2011] We’re focused on building a product and a business. Going public is an instrument and tool to help sustain the company. In the future, there may be an IPO, but I don’t know what the timing is.
- Jack Dorsey
The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.
- Jeff Bezos
Success is doing what you want, where you want, when you want, with whom you want and as much as you want.
- Tony Robbins
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
- Steve Jobs
For 20-plus years I looked at thousands of storyboard for corporate and product ads, and I never allowed one advertisement on the air that I didn’t like.
- Jack Welch
I don’t have any opinions about Russians. There are celebrity persons in each country. Different people do different things.
- Alexei Mordashov
Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, ‘Goodbye, Daddy!’ and I frowned, and said in reply, ‘Hold your shoulders back!’ Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father! Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. ‘What is it you want?’ I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding – this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years. And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed! It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! 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!’ I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much. Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. ‘To know all is to forgive all.
- Dale Carnegie
The microprocessor is a miracle.
- Bill Gates
The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’ … Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The most “successful” companies seemed to embrace a sort of anti-business model where they lost money as they grew.
- Peter Thiel
Our approach as a Group is based on strong economic, social and environmental principles. We strive to create high quality, visually stimulating innovative new homes and commercial developments that enhance, as well as integrate with, their surrounding natural and built environments.
- Lee Shau Kee
Make it just like a Mac.
- Bill Gates
John, never lend money to your friends; it will spoil your friendships.
- John D. Rockefeller
I was not an easy student, and I had to apply myself diligently to prepare my lessons, said Rockefeller, who described himself accurately as reliable but not brilliant.
- John D. Rockefeller
If I go public, I’ll stick to it.
- David Novak
The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.
- Nolan Bushnell
Winners expect to win, they expect victory, and they expect success!
- Zig Ziglar
As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.
- John C. Maxwell
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. To know all is to forgive all.
- Dale Carnegie
We are a country of artisans and a country of manufacturing. I think Japanese textile technology is the best in the world.
- Tadashi Yanai
We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
- Jeff Bezos
Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
