Notable Quotables

The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.

- Jeff Bezos

Have you ever heard of Gmail? Ever used it? If so, it’s not because Gmail ran a lot of TV ads (they didn’t). It’s because the manifesto of free email got to you.

- Seth Godin

A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

- Mark Zuckerberg

If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.

- Yoda

But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

- Peter Thiel

[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

PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.

- Ben Horowitz

Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself.

- Dale Carnegie

Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that… you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.

- Elon Musk

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

- Jeff Bezos

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

- Robert Frost

It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.

- Sam Walton

About 80% of our locations are second-generation. In other words, the building used to be, say, a Wal-Mart that moved out to become a Super Wal-Mart, or a Kmart that closed. It seems that such a site becomes available almost every year in every city.

- David Green

The boss would be present at the beginning of each session, laying out the rationale for the Work-Out. He or she would also commit to two things: to give an on-the-spot yes or no to 75 percent of the recommendations that came out of the session, and to resolve the remaining 25 percent within thirty days. The boss would then disappear until the end of the session, so as not to stifle open discussion, returning only at the end to make good on his or her promise.

- Jack Welch

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

- John F. Kennedy

I thought ‘Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers.

- Steve Martin

If you run a business, if you are responsible for a lot of people, you come to grips with the reality that you have to have discipline. You have to protect the enterprise in order to take care of the employees. So, therefore, you can’t be wasteful. You can’t squander things, or you jeopardize other people.

- Stephen Wynn

It doesn’t hurt to ask Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right.

- Seth Godin

Success is dependent upon the glands – sweat glands.

- Zig Ziglar

I think many start-ups make mistakes because they are focusing on things that are farther ahead, and they haven’t done the work that has built the foundation to support it.

- Howard Schultz

Simon received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his contribution to organizational decision making: It is impossible to have perfect and complete information at any given time to make a decision.

- Timothy Ferriss

Sometimes God will deliver you from the fire, and other times God will make you fireproof.

- Joel Olsteen

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

Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.

- Atul Gawande

While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.

- Ray Kroc

Building solid relationships in business is about helping others succeed and moving their efforts forward. This benefits both parties. Relationships are built easily, naturally, and profitably when you focus on helping the other party…

- 2014)

I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement.

- Donald Trump

Excepting for reading my numbers on Saturday morning and going to our regular meetings, I don’t have much of a routine for anything else. I always carry my little tape recorder on trips, to record ideas that come up in my conversations with the associates. I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.

- Sam Walton

The typical factory-centric organization places a premium on not-wrong, and spends no time at all weeding out those who don’t start. In the networked economy, the innovation-focused organization has no choice but to obsess about those who don’t start. Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don’t start, you never get a chance.

- Seth Godin

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World.

- Bill Gates

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure

- Abraham Lincoln

The bigger we get as a company, the more important it becomes for us to shift responsibility and authority toward the front lines, toward the department manager who’s stocking the shelves and talking to the customer. When we were much smaller, I probably wasn’t as quick to catch on to this idea as I do should have been. But as an avid student of management theory, back in the mid-seventies I started reading the work of W. Edwards Deming, the famous statistician who taught so much to the Japanese about improving their productivity and competitiveness.

- Sam Walton

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it.

- Steve Martin

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

- Warren Buffett

The goal is to be able to live your life the way Michael Jordan played basketball, or Marvin Gaye sang a song. To be able to feel the way you feel when you laugh at a joke, but to feel that way all the time.

- Russell Simmons

This isn’t stealing this is standing on the shoulders of giants.

- David Novak

A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn’t dramatic.

- Ray Dalio

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.

- Dale Carnegie

I’m a big believer than a great bit is a great bit – if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they’re beautiful things when they’re done.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The industrial age is ending, and a new one is beginning. It produces art instead of stuff and it rewards gracefulness.

- Seth Godin

The one thing coaches cannot tolerate… is the individual who grows arrogant because he excelled at a lower level and believes he has nothing else to learn.

- Zig Ziglar

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

I Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but i am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter

- Walt Disney

It’s not one of the enduring mysteries of all time. A motivated employee treats the customer well. A customer is happy so they’ll keep coming back, which pleases the shareholder. It’s just the way it works.

- Herb Kelleher

All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.

- Brian Tracy

Management will endeavour to actively encourage staff to broaden their experiences and job knowledge for extensive application in the process of improving the Group’s operational and competitive performance. Combined with our strengths in both entrepreneurial spirit and managerial professionalism, this would result in the creation of a leading edge honed in a relentless drive for operational excellence in the Group’s future pursuits.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The most obvious market segment in email-based payments was the millions of emigrants still using Western Union to wire money to their families back home. Our product made that effortless, but the transactions were too infrequent.

- Peter Thiel

I try to live what I teach. A lot of things come against us in life, but we should try to find something to be grateful for, and see each day as a gift.

- Joel Olsteen

There is nothing in this world that can compare with the Christian fellowship, nothing that can satisfy but Christ.

- John D. Rockefeller

I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.

- Thomas Edison

We certainly employ a lot of immigrants at Fox… and we do not take any consistent anti-immigrant line.

- Rupert Murdoch

Your attitude towards failure determines your altitude after failure.

- John C. Maxwell

Nobody ever accused me of wisdom of any kind, let alone conventional.

- Phil Knight

After I met my partner, Mr. Protherow, we decided to start a banking project, and at the same time we started to think already about a business on a bigger scale. At the very beginning we thought more about gaining money, to have a normal life with our families, etc.

- Vladimir Potanin

It doesn’t matter who likes you or doesn’t like you, all that matters is that God likes you. He accepts you, he approves of you.

- Joel Olsteen

Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

- Peter Thiel

Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

- Peter Thiel

I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

- Jeff Bezos

Well, we have to provide the world’s best schools. We certainly don’t have them, but that’s our objective.

- Michael Bloomberg

The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers Their name alone can practically guarantee hit records.

- Richard Branson

Here’s the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don’t you hate that? I love that there’s no map.

- Seth Godin

But use the opposite technique – be liberal with your encouragement, make the thing seem easy to do, let the other person know that you have faith in his ability to do it, that he has an undeveloped flair for it – and he will practise until the dawn comes in the window in order to excel.

- Dale Carnegie

3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we’re getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we’ve ever had before.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft

- Bill Gates

If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.

- Richard Branson

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

To create a big company, you need more partners, as it is hard to handle such a project alone. Such projects bring access to the expertise and management resources of the partners, and their connections above all.

- Vladimir Potanin

If you don’t have public hangings for bad culture in a company, if you don’t take people out and let them say, they went home to spend more time with the family. It’s crazy.

- Jack Welch

And I keep saying, whether you like the president or not, everybody has to pull together and help the president because, as the president goes, so goes the country, as the country goes, so goes your job, your ability to feed your family, your government.

- Michael Bloomberg

If you’re in business, first and foremost, you have to be nice. Show your customers that you care.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I’ve learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that’s what kids are playing. That’s what people are talking about.

- Bill Gates

The market’s going to move with tremendous speed. If there is such a thing as a killer app, video is it.

- John Chambers

PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan.

- Yoda

10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.

- Peter Thiel

I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.

- Steve Ballmer

Successful storytelling builds brand equity, and businesses with high brand equity don’t need to draw as much attention to themselves and their achievements as those that are still establishing their value to the customer.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

My principal business consists of giving commercial value to the brilliant, but misdirected, ideas of others…. Accordingly, I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.

- Thomas Edison

You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.

- Peter Thiel

First and foremost, there is a difference between being perceived as an expert and being one. In the context of business, the former is what sells product and the latter, relative to your minimal customer base,” is what creates good products and prevents returns.

- Timothy Ferriss

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

- General George S. Patton

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

- Elon Musk

There is a certain amount of dissatisfaction that goes with knowing your time, talent and abilities are not being properly used.

- Zig Ziglar

Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

- Napoleon Hill

Organizations that achieve both market and operating focus are nearly unbeatable Customers don’t buy products or services. They buy results. They were designed to break what Schlesinger and his colleagues called the cycle of failure practiced by many of Au Bon Pain’s competitors who paid their employees and managers low wages, offered them little training and other support, and suffered high turnover of employees and limited customer loyalty as a result.

- James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser and Leonard

I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that’s what this organization does.

- Sergey Brin

An enterprise shall help the people overcome all difficulties to savor the fruit to be borne on the motherland, come rain or shine.

- Cheng Yu-tung

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