I think there is probably no better person to aspire to emulate than Steve Jobs and what he has done at Apple in terms of his leadership, his innovation, not settling for mediocrity.
- Howard Schultz
Notable Quotables
I see tremendous imbalance in the world. A very uneven playing field, which has gotten tilted very badly. I consider it unstable. At the same time, I don’t exactly see what is going to reverse it.
- George Soros
If you have a lot of [visionaries], you’ll have a lot of great ideas, something awesome that people will love; but you never get it done. It doesn’t ship. Nothing happens. If you have too many [execution oriented] people on your team, you’re executing like mad, things are getting built, and you’re shipping like crazy – but you’re building something that nobody wants. If you have a good balance of both in your company, you’re more likely to stay on track. Those people compliment each other.
- Caterina Fake
If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning.
- Larry Page
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
- Arthur Golden
The Interros strategy toward various assets generally depends on the stage of their development and level of their maturity.
- Vladimir Potanin
I recall that Harry made a trip to San Bernardino about the time we were really starting to roll, and Dick McDonald asked him what he thought the future of McDonald’s would be. Harry told him that one day this company would be bigger than F. W. Woolworth. Dick really did a double take at that. He told me later, ‘I thought you had a genuine nut on your hands, Ray.’ But Harry knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he knew how to get there.
- Ray Kroc
Un cambio de actitud Lo que diferencia a los individuos exitosos de aquellos que languidecen es exactamente lo mismo que separa a las organizaciones innovadoras y en crecimiento de aquellas que se estancan y mueren. Los ganadores han convertido la iniciativa en una pasión y en una práctica. Adelante, prepara una lista de las personas y organizaciones a las que admiras. Apuesto a que el séptimo imperativo es lo que las hace destacar. Como ves, el reto no consiste en perfeccionar tu capacidad de saber cuándo empezar o cuándo mantenerte al margen, sino en adoptar la costumbre de empezar.
- Seth Godin
In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
- Harry Truman
True joy comes when you inspire, encourage, and guide someone else on a path that benefits him or her.
- Zig Ziglar
Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.
- P.T. Barnum
What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.
- Reid Hoffman
Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin
What has habit been doing to me?
- Dale Carnegie
It is my practice to try to understand how valuable something is by trying to imagine myself without it.
- Herb Kelleher
Character is to man what carbon is to steel.
- Napoleon Hill
The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.
- John C. Maxwell
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
- Bill Gates
All my friends ask me, ‘Am I number one in the world in [receiving] dividend payments?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, ask Forbes.’
- Lee Shau Kee
A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.
- John C. Maxwell
Today is our most precious possession. It is our only sure possession.
- Dale Carnegie
Konosuke Matsushita was a visionary entrepreneur. He started working very young as a teenager, and he eventually created Panasonic to become a truly global company.
- Tadashi Yanai
What this industry is about is back to the basics in the new Internet economy; and the basics are profitability, cash flow, productivity and market-share gains.
- John Chambers
Doughnuts are a normal part of a healthy, balanced diet.
- Brooke Smith
Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.
- Timothy Ferriss
You have to come up with what the consumer wants, and you need a vehicle to understand it.
- Phil Knight
Freely chosen, discipline is absolute freedom.
- James C. Collins
You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
- Walt Disney
it was necessary to bait the hook to suit the fish.
- Dale Carnegie
Common Core is a big win for education.
- Bill Gates
You can’t jump to vegan if you’re not. Some people are absolute. Some people are able to be gradual.
- Russell Simmons
It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested? Collin’s advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.
- James C. Collins
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
- Oprah Winfrey
Civilization is meant to be easy…
- Jack Dorsey
The student who elects to risk it all—which is nothing—to establish an online video rental service that delivers $5,000 per month in income from a small niche of Blu-ray aficionados, a two-hour-per-week side project that allows him to work full-time as an animal rights lobbyist.
- Timothy Ferriss
Relatively few people should start companies.
- Reid Hoffman
A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren’t dependent on Washington doing something different.
- Bill Gates
The failure to strangle Bolshevism at its birth and to bring Russia, then prostrate, by one means or another, into the general democratic system lies heavy upon us today.
- Winston Churchill
I want to own the New York Jets, that’s what I want. And I absolutely believe I am going to own the Jets.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
No matter what happens, always be yourself.
- Dale Carnegie
Insulation prevents you from making the change and finding the understanding you set out to achieve in the first place.
- Seth Godin
You are safer here tonight than you would be on the streets of any other city in the world.
- Michael Bloomberg
I tell my employees that we’re in the service business, and it’s incidental that we fly airplanes.
- Herb Kelleher
My message is that God is a good God.
- Joel Olsteen
Get mad, then get over it.
- Colin Powell
Every pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, but every optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- Winston Churchill
The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.
- Larry Ellison
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
- Timothy Ferriss
Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.
- Clayton M. Christensen
What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do some thing about them.
- Henry Ford
The UK desperately needs less government and freer markets.
- Rupert Murdoch
Use every customer point of contact to weave stories about who you are and what your brand stands for.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I don’t think there’s a… boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.
- Bill Gates
For any Silicon Valley company, the most important thing is the company. And any great founders need to get out of the way of the company. We presented a spark with an idea.
- Jack Dorsey
All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths.
- Napoleon Hill
Law of Clarity – If you can’t explain what you sell to a ten-year old child then you don’t know what you sell.
- Jerry Vass
A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.
- Arnold Glasow
MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped: Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining? Was customer satisfaction rising or falling? What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.
- Ben Horowitz
Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.
- Jack Welch
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
I never took classic business classes in college, so I don’t have the background that any of the people running large companies have.
- Howard Schultz
In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.
- Peter Thiel
Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.
- Napoleon Hill
It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
After all, a man’s Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.
- Winston Churchill
Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support – a significant problem in the software industry.
- Bill Gates
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
Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.
- Dale Carnegie
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
- Winston Churchill
Of course I’m an egoist. Where do you get if you aren’t?
- Winston Churchill
If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.
- Seth Godin
When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?
- Jack Welch
I enjoy myself a lot but I derive my joy from working. I believe in hard work and one of my business success secret is hard work.
- Aliko Dangote
I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.
- Joel Osteen
We are always listening to ideas presented by our customers and in an effort to keep up with their demands, we are adding those quality improvements to Atlanta Motor Speedway. The changes we have planned are a direct result of fan input and are aimed at giving our fans options they currently don’t have.
- Ed Clark
Motivation gets you going and habit gets you there.
- Zig Ziglar
Everybody has a calling. And your real job in life is to figure out as soon as possible what that is, who you were meant to be, and to begin to honor that in the best way possible for yourself.
- Oprah Winfrey
The record results for the third quarter once again demonstrate the ability of GE’s diverse mix of leading global businesses to deliver top-line growth, increased margins and strong cash generation.
- Jack Welch
Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract failure.
- Timothy Ferriss
I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom.
- Michael Bloomberg
When plans appear into your mind, they will probably flash into your mind through the sixth sense, in the form of an inspiration. This inspiration may be considered a direct telegram, or message from infinite intelligence. Treat it with respect, and act upon it as soon as you receive it. Failure to do this is fatal to your succeess.
- Napoleon Hill
The secret of happiness is renunciation.
- Andrew Carnegie
On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We’ve got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers – and there could be a lot of them – will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.
- Howard Schultz
Thank you is probably the most important thing that a leader can say.
- David Novak
Be candid with everyone. Candor is the biggest dirty little secret in business?
- Jack Welch
You learn how to be book smart in school, but you better not forget that you also need to be street smart.
- Harvey Mackay
The responsibility of the leader is to define reality and create hope.
- David Novak
Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.
- Bill Gates
I know I could be the host of ‘SportsCenter’ in two years if I changed my show today to sports.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
- Winston Churchill
We learn by doing.
- Aristotle
Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence.
- Jack Welch
It is always your next move.
- Napoleon Hill
We’re really going after truly creating sustainability of a disease-free state, creating a complete system for managing cancer patients for life, so that you can manage from onset of disease all the way through.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.
- Henry Ford
There is nothing either good or bad.
- William Shakespeare
I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.
- Winston Churchill
Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.
- Walt Disney
If you will remain at rest and hold your peace, then the battle is not yours, but the battle is the Lord’s.
- Joel Olsteen
If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
- Andrew Carnegie
