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
Notable Quotables
My husband is such a healthy eater. Except when it comes to sweets. He never consumes anything except fruit until noon. And then from noon on he might have some brown rice and some tofu, and then, come eight or nine at night, he orders three mud-pie double-chocolate pieces of cake and eats all three of them.
- Sara Blakely
Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing, right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.
- Seth Godin
Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.
- Seth Godin
I came over from Wal-Mart to help set up Sam’s. Since we were patterned after PRICE CLUBS, sometimes we copied them without exactly knowing what we were doing. We were bringing a West Coast idea to the Midwest, and we didn’t know how it would be received. I remember one idea that didn’t transfer too well. Price Club had a huge stack of wine in front of its stores. We bought the same amound for our stores in the Midwest and we learned the hard way that Midwesterners aren’t exactly wine drinkers. (on competition)
- Ron Loveles
People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.
- Peter Drucker
If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
- Peter Thiel
The purpose of process is communication. If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process, because you can just talk to each other.
- Ben Horowitz
If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
- Elon Musk
Applause is a receipt, not a bill.
- Dale Carnegie
I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.
- Bill Gates
Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.
- John C. Maxwell
We’ve announced an Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, a bunch of low-cost commodity servers running Linux, integrated in our case, with InfiniBand – connected with InfiniBand vs. the traditional Ethernet.
- Larry Ellison
Go from me to we. This is the job of every leader.
- Magic Johnson and David Novak
If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.
- Harvey Mackay
And if I were the president, I’d go out there and I’d emphasize the things I have done, and I’d say, ‘Some things haven’t worked, and I’m sorry about that, but I keep trying.’ And I’m – and I think the president is a very viable candidate, and you’re going to have a real horse race here no matter who the Republican nominee is.
- Michael Bloomberg
I produced Run DMC. I produced some early records, lots of records early on.
- Russell Simmons
As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies. At my companies, our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one.
- Elon Musk
Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.
- Bill Gates
Stock ownership changes behavior.
- Jack Welch
The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.
- Napoleon Hill
If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?
- Joel Olsteen
I know how to make decisions and stand up to the criticism every day.
- Michael Bloomberg
Gratitude is the single greatest treasure I will take with me from this experience.
- Oprah Winfrey
This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.
- Winston Churchill
The idea would be in my mind – and I know it sounds strange – is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that’s exceeding what we can even use. It’ll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards- the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
- Walt Disney
Don’t sling mud at others or soon you will find yourself in a deeper hole than when you started.
- Clay Clark
God wants us to live consistently, He wants us to enjoy every single day of our lives.
- Joel Olsteen
Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.
- Clayton M. Christensen
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
- Henry Ford
The way to stay ahead was through product innovation. We happened to be great at it.
- Phil Knight
Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
- Peter Thiel
I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.
- Phil Knight
We need to, you know, restore people. We need to show mercy. I mean, because as much mercy as you show people, that’s the mercy you’re going to be receiving.
- Joel Olsteen
With residential property prices having dropped by around two-thirds from their peak in 1997 and local interest rates dropping to their historic lows, mortgage payments currently falls below rental payment. This positive carry has led to property purchases by both home purchasers as well as investors. Further, with the local stock market becoming active again and reaching its highest level in the past 17 months, this has resulted in an increase in the number of transactions and a price for the luxury properties.
- Lee Shau Kee
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
- Jeff Bezos
When sales people don’t know what to do, they talk. The ordinary salesperson vomits the presentation onto the Buyer’s desktop.
- Jerry Vass
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
- Warren Buffett
On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.
- Seth Godin
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
- Aristotle
By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.
- Bill Gates
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
An educated man is not, necessarily, one who has an abundance of general or specialized knowledge. An educated man is one who has so developed the faculties of his mind that he may acquire anything he wants, or its equivalent, without violating the rights of others.
- Napoleon Hill
I start where the last man left off.
- Thomas Edison
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
Velocity and drive comes from your desire to achieve.
- Jim Cathcart
In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
- Ben Horowitz
Mr. Ford’s most rapid strides became noticable from the time he became a personal friend of Thomas A. Edison, and you will begin to understand what the influence of one mind upon another can accomplish.
- Napoleon Hill
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
So what we do every Monday is review the whole business…I put out an agenda – 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.
- Steve Jobs
I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it’s hard to get them out on the air.
- Steve Martin
If people talk about you, being jealous, critical, and trying to make you look bad, don’t let that change you. You don’t need their approval when you have God’s approval.
- Joel Olsteen
Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.
- Winston Churchill
In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death.
- Peter Thiel
Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.
- Bill Gates
Young people, when they’re left alone, always want to have compassion, and they always want to give. They always want to help people who are less fortunate.
- Russell Simmons
Leaders think like a revolutionary not a bureaucrat.
- Napoleon Hill
Well we know that people in Austrailia love the idea of both Impulse and Virgin Blue getting up and adding a bit of competition, and it’s fun to be able to deliver it.
- Richard Branson
For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.
- Steve Wozniak
When you allow what someone says or does to upset you, you’re allowing that person to control you.
- Joel Olsteen
Disruption is like an earthquake. Disruption has no purpose. It has not values. It has no organizing principle. It has no direction and it has no leadership… This is not what we want to bring into the world. What we want to bring into the world is revolution.
- Jack Dorsey
Death will come, no matter what anyone may think about it. Accept it as a necessity, and pass the thought out of your mind…Death is mere transition. If death is not mere a change, or transition then nothing comes after death except a long, eternal peaceful sleep and sleep is nothing to be feared. Thus you may wipe out, forever, the fear of Death….a busy person seldom has time to think about dying. He finds life too thrilling to worry about death
- Napoleon Hill
But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.
- Peter Thiel
In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.
- James C. Collins
Being an Entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death
- Elon Musk
Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.
- Seth Godin
I am going to enjoy some other things apart from business.
- Jack Ma
A lot of preachers’ kids are some of the most rebellious kids in the world. I never was like that.
- Joel Olsteen
We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.
- Steve Jobs
If you don’t change the direction you are going, then you’re likely to end up where you’re heading…
- John C. Maxwell
TV is a great big megaphone,” and when you can only afford to spend dozens of dollars acquiring a new customer, you need the biggest megaphone you can find.
- Peter Thiel
Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market.
- Peter Thiel
The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.
- Peter Thiel
The UK desperately needs less government and freer markets.
- Rupert Murdoch
The Group adopts a two-pronged strategy in its business development in mainland China. In the prime cities, the Group targets those prime sites with heavy pedestrian flow and easy access for development into large-scale complexes of exceptional design and quality. In the second-tier cities, which are mostly provincial capitals or municipalities with a preponderance of middle class residents, the Group focuses on large-scale developments so as to achieve an efficient use of land as well as long-term appreciation in property value.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’m not losing any sleep over Dunkin Donuts.
- Howard Schultz
There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Our teachers deserve better feedback.
- Bill Gates
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
Okay, let’s talk about cartoon labels for half a second – some people think anything with a dog or a car or a colorful alien is garbage, which is not true. Look at Big Moose Red. It’s, like, a $6 wine with a cheesy label, and it’s actually a solid wine.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.
- Peter Thiel
The Secret Make up your mind that no matter what comes your way, no matter how difficult, no matter how unfair, you will do more than simply survive. You will thrive in spite of it.
- Joel Olsteen
Fears are nothing more than states of mind.
- Napoleon Hill
The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.
- Reed Hastings
There is nothing either good or bad.
- William Shakespeare
I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
A good practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance. This will give her a chance to cancel the meeting if nothing is pressing.
- Ben Horowitz
Only a company with great integrity and the resources to fight for what’s right can afford to take on the government.
- Jack Welch
You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.
- Steve Martin
Thinking back to old-time computer programming in the days before programming languages supported internationalization, we used to have to “internationalize” our code. We called this internationalization process “I18N” for short (localization was L10N), which meant I followed by eighteen letters followed by N.
- Ben Horowitz
There are two types of people in the world. One type is known as leaders and the other as followers. Decide at the outset whether you intend to become a leader in your chose calling or remain a follower. The difference in compensation is vast. The follwer cannot reasonably expect the compensation to which a leader is entitled, although many followers make the mistake of expecting such pay.
- Napoleon Hill
But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
We need to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what you do to someone, discipline is what you do for someone.
- Zig Ziglar
Install the proper systems.
- David Green
I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.
- Michael Gerber
Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.
- Stephen R. Covey
There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.
- Napoleon Hill
I don’t like accidental success. It’s what Bill Gates calls ‘random,’ a term he uses with the opposite of respect.
- Masayoshi Son
My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars – this is very important – so you don’t have to carry the return fuel when you go there.
- Elon Musk
