I had already started the learning process by organizing a tour of some of the best companies out there to find out exactly what it was that made them great. I went back to the Partners’ Council and asked them to help me study the best practices of the best companies we could find. We would then use then findings to strengthen our company.
- David Novak
Notable Quotables
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
- Winston Churchill
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
- Bill Gates
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
- Michael Dell
If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that’s not going to promote healthiness.
- Larry Page
Sweden is famous for many things – but not fashion.
- Stefan Persson
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
- Benjamin Franklin
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
You either trust someone day one until they prove you wrong, or you say, ‘I don’t trust you until you show me I can trust you.’ I’m the latter.
- Charles Ergen
We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
Look, I’m a passionate entrepreneur. I’m like fire and brimstone sometimes. And so there are times when I’ll go—I’ll get too into the weeds and too into the debate, because I’m so passionate about it.
- Travis Kalanick
My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.
- Winston Churchill
This shows you are never too old to get surprised.
- Jack Welch
Be a peg, hammered into the frozen ground, immovable.
- Winston Churchill
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
- Ben Horowitz
Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.
- Larry Page
School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.
- Reed Hastings
Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds, and when they grow up, they will change the world.
- Jack Ma
Oracle’s got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP’s got nothin’ but SuccessFactors until 2020.
- Larry Ellison
Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.
- Bill Gates
The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you think you can only do a little.
- Zig Ziglar
Selling is essentially a transfer of feelings.
- Zig Ziglar
Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
- Colin Powell
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
If you are not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are automatically engaged in becoming the person you don’t want to be.
- Dale Carnegie
If I go public, I’ll stick to it.
- David Novak
You have to take away some of tax breaks for the wealthy, and you have to cut back on some entitlements. Because, unless we do all of these things, it just doesn’t work. And what’s good theater and what’s good politics isn’t necessarily good economic policy.
- Michael Bloomberg
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery..
- Winston Churchill
For the year ended 31 December 2011, the Group sold 325 residential units in Hong Kong, generating attributable sales revenue of HK$8,308 million, a marked increase when compared with HK$4,842 million for the previous financial year.
- Lee Shau Kee
It’s a libel to say that I use my newspapers to support my other business interests. The fact is, I haven’t got any other business interests.
- Rupert Murdoch
Throw it all up on the wall and see what sticks.
- Timothy Ferriss
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.
- Winston Churchill
You don’t have to start from scratch to do something interesting. You don’t have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world. You have to have a good idea. You have to convince other people of those good ideas. And you have to push as quickly as possible.
- Jack Dorsey
The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks.
- Rupert Murdoch
Wal-Mart’s leaders had obviously made a point of educating and informing everyone at all levels about all aspects of the company, and that shows a real respect for their people.
- David Novak
In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.
- Bill Gates
I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement.
- Donald Trump
The industrial age is ending, and a new one is beginning. It produces art instead of stuff and it rewards gracefulness.
- Seth Godin
You must focus on WIN. What’s important now.
- Lee Cockerell
I’m an Urban Scholar.
- Michael Ward
Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as ‘community entrepreneurship.’
- Donald Bren
I am upset with the effect that both of these issues have had on the public,
- Michael Gerber
The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat.
- Napoleon Hill
Exercise is overrated.
- Timothy Ferriss
Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.
- Ben Horowitz
Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.
- Elon Musk
Customers tend to avoid a restaurant that’s going aswamp in its own sludge.
- Ray Kroc
I am a normal guy.
- Vagit Alekperov
I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know anything about the speaker so there’s nothing that makes me want to get up early and go to it. I might catch it on TV.
- John Chambers
I think our main real estate effort should be directed at getting out in front of expansion and letting the population build out to us.
- Sam Walton
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
- Bill Gates
I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household’s income.
- Thomas J Stanley
I DECLARE that God has a great plan for my life. He is directing my steps. And even though I may not always understand how, I know my situation is not a surprise to God. He will work out every detail to my advantage. In His perfect timing, everything will turn out right. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.
- Winston Churchill
Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Desire is created when something happens in your life that suddenly changes the way you see yourself in relationship to your future.
- Zig Ziglar
Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they’ll be there for you.
- Zig Ziglar
Japanese tend to put sales and market share first. They make many products with the aim of raising sales. But then profits decline, and companies find themselves falling into debt… I changed the mindset at Canon by getting people to realize that profits come first.
- Fujio Mitarai
Service is the key to everything in life.
- Russell Simmons
Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another.
- Seth Godin
[In January 2011] I think the important thing for Twitter is that it works on any technology.
- Jack Dorsey
He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life.
- Ron Chernow
I could’ve just walked away but I never could have forgiven myself to allow Starbucks to drift into mediocrity or not be relevant. I just couldn’t be a bystander.
- Howard Schultz
Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Bolsheviks create their own difficulties which they successfully overcame later.
- Winston Churchill
Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.
- John C. Maxwell
Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.
- Steve Jobs
Bell took the opposite approach, building multiple restaurants in a single neighborhood to eliminate the competition. It’s a strategy that’s widely used today by many companies like Starbuck’s, Barnes & Noble, and many others, and it worked for Bell.
- David Novak
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.
- Andrew Carnegie
If the employees come first, then they’re happy….A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy, so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It’s not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.
- Herb Kelleher
“What would you do if capital were free?” is a dangerous question to ask an entrepreneur. It’s kind of like asking a fat person, “What would you do if ice cream had the exact same nutritional value as broccoli?”
- Ben Horowitz
Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and “do well by doing good.” Usually they end up doing neither.
- Peter Thiel
Often the best way to develop workers – when you are sure they have the character and think they have the ability – is to take them to a deep place, throw them in and make them sink or swim.
- John D. Rockefeller
When you do things the right way, you have nothing to lose because you have nothing to fear.
- Zig Ziglar
To grow your company explosively you must have leaders, not just efficient managers.
- John Maxwell
Often people fail to start or complete a task because they don’t see any connection between what they’re doing and what they really want to accomplish in life.
- John C. Maxwell
By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: ‘John, I’d love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I’ve got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said ‘no’ yesterday. Gotta run!
- Timothy Ferriss
Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.
- Zig Ziglar
Stay focused instead of getting offended or off track by others.
- John C. Maxwell
We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.
- Napoleon Hill
What we’ve gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question ‘Can we trust Microsoft?’
- Steve Ballmer
I have the favor of God. I can do all things through Christ. I am blessed. I’m strong. I’m healthy.
- Joel Olsteen
A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Its never too late…to start heading in the right direction.
- Seth Godin
I am a former sabre fencer and fenced as part of the Uzbek republic team.
- Alisher Usmanov
Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s not the situation, but whether we react negative or respond positive to the situation that is important.
- Zig Ziglar
My revenue was $4 million my first year in business, off of one $20 item.
- Sara Blakely
The basis of persistence is the power of will. Men who accumulate, great fortunes are generally known as cold-blooded and sometimes ruthless. Often they are misunderstood. What they have is willpower, which they mix with persistence and place back of their desires to insure that attainment of their objectives. Henry Ford was generally misunderstood to be ruthless and cold-blooded. This misconception grew out of Ford’s habit of following through in all of his plans with PERSISTENCE…few carry on despite all opposition until they attain their goal. Those few are the Fords, Carnegies, Rockefellers and Edisons.
- Napoleon Hill
What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.
- Elon Musk
All of us profit from being corrected – if we’re corrected in a positive way.
- Sam Walton
How fortunate it was for the world that when these great trials came upon it there was a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave.
- Winston Churchill
The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.
- James C. Collins
At first, we couldn’t be establishment, because we didn’t have any money. We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we’ve had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned.
- Phil Knight
The reason we love our parents is because they loved us first. Every single company should take this advice.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
After the decline in the past few years, the worst moment in the economy of Hong Kong is now behind us. The local property market is expected to show a steady upward trend as from this point.
- Lee Shau Kee
One of my biggest flaws is I don’t take advice.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power.
- Sergey Brin
To be a champion, you have to learn to handle stress and pressure. But if you’ve prepared mentally and physically, you don’t have to worry.
- Harvey Mackay
