In the end, Mockler and the board were proved right, stunningly so. If a shareflipper had accepted the 44 percent price premium offered by Ronald Perelman on October 31, 1986, and then invested the full amount in the general market for ten years, through the end of 1996, he would have come out three times worse off than a shareholder who had stayed with Mockler and Gillette.20 Indeed, the company, its customers, and the shareholders would have been ill served had Mockler capitulated to the raiders, pocketed his millions, and retired to a life of leisure.
- James C. Collins
Notable Quotables
Life is too short to be small.
- Benjamin Disraeli
I try to do things that I think are helpful to the environment, to the animals, and to the planet.
- Russell Simmons
The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
It is equally important that diversification is an ongoing process.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Cherish each hour of this day for it can never return.
- Og Mandino
If you can’t retain the people after an acquisition, it’s not worth it.
- John Chambers
To be a superstar, you must do something exceptional. Not just survive the Dip, but use the Dip as an opportunity to create something so extraordinary that people can’t help but talk about it, recommend it, and, yes, choose it.
- Seth Godin
The abundance mindset makes it easier to be graceful.
- Seth Godin
Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut.
- Winston Churchill
Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
- Sam Walton
Someday, man will harness the rise and fall of the tides, imprison the power of the sun, and release atomic power.
- Thomas Edison
What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.
- John Chambers
Men sometimes stumble over the truth, but often pick themselves up and hurry off as though nothing had happened.
- Winston Churchill
You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.
- Larry Page
Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.
- Harvey Mackay
Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.
- Winston Churchill
Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.
- Henry Ford
Failures are life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you are off course. Trying new things and not being afraid to fail along the way are more important than what you learn in school.
- Sara Blakely
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.
- Winston Churchill
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
Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.
- Larry Ellison
As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation. I have to be good at helping people run the individual businesses, and I have to be willing to step back. The company must be set up so it can continue without me.
- Richard Branson
The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.
- Dale Carnegie
My favorite writers are all Jews – David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark – well, you get the picture.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m a storyteller. I love to tell stories about brands. I love to tell stories, period. I like painting pictures through the words, and that’s what I do.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.
- Seth Godin
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
Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.
- Winston Churchill
When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.
- Napoleon Hill
To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone
- Sergey Brin
The entrepreneur community, there’s a certain kind of founder, they call them a ‘lone wolf.’ I probably fit in that category.
- Travis Kalanick
I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.
- Jeff Bezos
I like a man who grins when he fights.
- Winston Churchill
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
Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories… We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there.
- Mark Zuckerberg
It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.
- Napoleon Hill
Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.
- Jack Welch
Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.
- James C. Collins
The screwball. Humor can often be effective and with this style, it’s emphasized. Appeal to the journalist’s heightened sense of the unusual. Stunts, sideshows, ancillary themes are put to work here.
- Michael Levine
I do feel, in a sense, the rules of engagement for citizenship has changed, and we must encourage other people to speak up and to take action.
- Howard Schultz
Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.
- Bill Gates
Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world arent going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants. –
- Service Profit Chain
It’s almost always harder to raise capital than you thought it would be, and it always takes longer. So plan for that.
- Richard Harroch
We shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape us.
- Winston Churchill
A lady came up to me one day and said ‘Sir! You are drunk’, to which I replied ‘I am drunk today madam, and tomorrow I shall be sober but you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
Learning is not done to you, it is something you choose to do.
- Seth Godin
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
There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late.
- Og Mandino
There would be no advantage to be gained by sowing a field of wheat if the harvest did not return more than was sown.
- Napoleon Hill
The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.
- Seth Godin
Indecision is the seedling of fear.
- Napoleon Hill
If we can put a man on the moon, we can make pantyhose comfortable.
- Sara Blakely
Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.
- Sam Walton
In absorbing companies, Rockefeller was secretive and asked them to continue operating under their original names and not divulge their Standard Oil Ownership. They were instructed to retain their original stationary, keep secret accounts, and not allude on paper to their Cleveland connection.
- Ron Chernow
I think when you’re very dedicated to something and you’re engaged fully, you become a giver.
- Russell Simmons
(1) Define a to-do list and (2) define a not-to-do list. In general terms, there are but two questions:
- Timothy Ferriss
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.
- Ben Horowitz
Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively – I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook – it sounds trivial, but people matter.
- Reid Hoffman
Let go of yesterday. Let today be a new beginning and be the best that you can, and you’ll get to where God wants you to be.
- Joel Olsteen
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
- Steve Jobs
The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.
- Bill Gates
Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.
- Brene Brown
So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.
- Sergey Brin
I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.
- Winston Churchill
Deep knowledge from your manager goes a long way toward motivating you. And I have a pretty good capability for that.
- Larry Page
Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
- Warren Buffett
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.
- Peter Thiel
I always follow 4E’s wrapped in a ‘P’.
- Jack Welch
Entrepreneurs must protect themselves and the venture at all times by documenting your agreements.
- Jack Nadel
When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.
- Donald Trump
I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
- Bill Gates
If you learn to pray bold prayers… it allows God to do big things in your life.
- Joel Olsteen
I think Ronald Reagan was one of the great presidents, period, not just recently. I thought he had the demeanor. I thought he had the bearing. I thought he had the thought process.
- Donald Trump
I will everyday as just a blow from my blade against a mighty oak…strike until it falls quote.
- Og Mandino
Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.
- Ben Horowitz
I want the services to look and sound like the Grammys. It’s not showy, but we represent God, and it should be first class.
- Joel Olsteen
When life gives you lemons make lemonade!!
- Dale Carnegie
[On the cost to found Nike] Six hundred dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars total investment.
- Phil Knight
I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.
- Howard Schultz
My father worked all the time.
- Michael Bloomberg
It’s unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Where did your art go while you were tweeting?
- Seth Godin
I couldn’t figure out what to wear under my clothes. The body shapers were too thick at the time.
- Sara Blakely
Africa is on the rise.
- Bill Gates
I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed…You only have to be right once…I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.
- Mark Cuban
We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective.
- Peter Thiel
I’m a voracious reader.
- Howard Schultz
He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.
- Winston Churchill
A right delayed is a right denied.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I prefer the old theaters because the audience is… trapped.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
- Peter Thiel
I wouldn’t ever say if you’re having tough times then there must be something wrong with you or your attitude. Life’s a fight. It’s a good fight of faith. I encourage people to stay up, stay hopeful, stay faith-filled.
- Joel Olsteen
Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.”
- Bill Gates
What kind of business world are we living in?
- Jack Ma
Now that we have run out of money we have to think.
- Winston Churchill
I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.
- Walt Disney
The Group has not been deterred by any negative sentiment and will as ever respond to the challenges and opportunities ahead of us with the same spirit of caution, flexibility, determination and dynamism, which have brought much success to us in the past.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I’m a positive person, so I don’t get bogged down with it. If you’re expecting that, if you wall in that, if you practice that, then you’ll attract what you fear.
- Denzel Washington
