Notable Quotables

I know I could be the host of ‘SportsCenter’ in two years if I changed my show today to sports.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.

- Peter Drucker

I’m on the Facebook board now. Little did they know that I thought Facebook was really stupid when I first heard about it back in 2005.

- Reed Hastings

You have to have a dream, whether big or small. Then plan, focus, work hard and be very determined to achieve your goals.

- Henry Sy

I can’t stress enough the essential nature of really hearing what someone has to say even if it is totally contradictory to your own beliefs, and I wish this was a lesson I only had to learn once.

- David Novak

Too often, we have tended to fall into a trap of creating plain hamburgers.

- Tadashi Yanai

Not if anything to say about it I have.

- Yoda

Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.

- Seth Godin

Effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible.

- Jack Welch

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

- Bill Gates

Most people believe that results matter. The idea that results matter is one that you have to keep letting go of. And most of the time, I believe it.

- Russell Simmons

If there is to be a low-cost Uber, Uber will be the low-cost Uber.

- Travis Kalanick

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.

- Sam Walton

People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.

- Timothy Ferriss

The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.

- Clayton M. Christensen

If you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers to these questions, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit – aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probably scenarios?4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?5. What are you putting off out of fear?6. What is it costing you – financially, emotionally, and physically – to postpone action?7. What are you waiting for?

- Timothy Ferriss

You don’t ever want to sell, you want customers to sell.

- Clay Clark

We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.

- Walt Disney

Some people are so belligerent in their communication style that people just stop talking when they are in the room. If every time anyone brings up an issue with the marketing organization, the VP of marketing jumps down their throats, then guess what topic will never come up? This behavior can become so bad that nobody brings up any topic when the jerk is in the room. As a result, communication across the executive staff breaks down and the entire company slowly degenerates. Note that this only happens if the jerk in question is unquestionably brilliant. Otherwise, nobody will care when she attacks them. The bite only has impact if it comes from a big dog. If one of your big dogs destroys communication on your staff, you need to send her to the pound.

- Ben Horowitz

Of course, the challenge of being the initiator is that you’ll be wrong. You’ll pick the wrong thing, you’ll waste time, you’ll be blamed. This is why being an initiator is valuable. Most people shy away from the challenge. They’ve been too abused, they’re too fearful, they hold back, they’re happy to let someone else take the heat. Initiative is scarce. Hence valuable. Ditch digging is not scarce. It’s not hard at all to find manual labor at minimum wage, which is precisely why manual labor gets paid minimum wage. It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.

- Seth Godin

You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It wont happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.

- Joel Olsteen

My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.

- Joel Olsteen

Some of the things I see around town are just disgusting.

- Jack Taylor

My drive into high tech doesn’t involve a lot of people – just me and a very small team.

- Raymond Kwok

If you think you are leading and turn around to see no one following, then you are just taking a walk.

- Benjamin Hooks

Life’s too short to spend it trying to keep others happy. You can’t please everyone. To fulfill your destiny, stay true to your heart.

- Joel Olsteen

With the addition of these volumes, our Gulf Coast region is off to a good start for 2006 in its effort to grow its production. Combined, all regions are now showing growth in both production and reserves which is very attractive, especially considering the organic strategy on which we have predominately focused.

- Dan Dinges

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

- Peter Drucker

One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But… I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison

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

Your job should make you want to get out of bed

- Tony Hsieh

When you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.

- Zig Ziglar

I don’t know where we should take this company, but I do know that if I start with the right people, ask them the right questions, and engage them in vigorous debate, we will find a way to make this company great.

- James C. Collins

It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, first to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous…

- Winston Churchill

If you’re not one or two in the market, you don’t make money. The market leaders make the money.

- Jack Welch

We will as ever continue to pursue growth opportunities that will further enhance our ability to capitalize on the investment opportunities and to face the challenges ahead.

- Cheng Yu-tung

Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that – it’s hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate ’em.

- Ben Horowitz

For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.

- James C. Collins

Not only was the casual shoe effort a failure, but it was diluting our trademark and hurting us in running.

- Phil Knight

RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.

- Jack Welch

We are in the process of creating a group that has a broader business mix, better quality income streams and a stronger balance sheet. In doing so, our risk profile is spread out and we can better explore the growth potential across our five core businesses – property, hotels, infrastructure, services and telecommunications.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I hate politics. What they say and what they do is completely different.

- Tadashi Yanai

The U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar, the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro.

- Peter Thiel

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

- Peter Drucker

Abe Lincoln once remarked that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

- Dale Carnegie

Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.

- Peter Drucker

All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can’t worry about it, you can’t panic when you look at the stock market’s decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.

- Larry Ellison

Good product managers crisply define the target, the “what” (as opposed to the “how”), and manage the delivery of the “what.” Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out “how.” Good product managers communicate crisply to engineering in writing as well as verbally. Good product managers don’t give direction informally. Good product managers gather information informally.

- Ben Horowitz

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

- Bill Gates

The problem with common sense is that it’s not really that common. – David Novak CEO of Yum! Brands

- David Novak

The most expensive piece of real estate is the six inches between your right and left ear. It’s what you create in that area that determines your wealth. We are only really limited by our mind.

- Dr. Dolf de Roos

Money is like an arm or leg – use it or lose it.

- Henry Ford

The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’ … Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time.

- Mark Zuckerberg

It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.

- Seth Godin

We beat our expectations in the run up to Christmas and this time last year we had particularly high stock levels leading to a bigger clearance.

- Simon Wolfson

Taxes are not good things, but if you want services, somebody’s got to pay for them so they’re a necessary evil.

- Michael Bloomberg

Don’t solicit feedback on your product, your idea, or your business just for validation purposes. Be really careful about that. You want to tell the people that can help move your idea forward. But if you’re just looking to your friend, coworker, husband, wife, for validation, be careful. Because out of love… a lot of people will express some concerns, and it can stop a lot of multi-million dollar ideas right in their tracks.

- Sara Blakely

Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.

- Jack Welch

No leader enjoys making the tough decision. We constantly faced severe resistence from even the best people in our organization. I’ve struggled with this problem myself and have often been guilty of not being rigorous enough. Every impulse is to look the other way.

- Jack Welch

Some people do really find fault like there’s a reward for it.

- Zig Ziglar

Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.

- Reed Hastings

Don’t have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.

- Steve Martin

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

- Winston Churchill

Create a vision and personalize it. People need to say, I understand it, I’m excited about it, and I can make it happen.

- David Novak

Today, and I’m very strongly against tax increases.

- Donald Trump

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

- Bill Gates

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.

- Winston Churchill

My parents got one bedroom, my three sisters got the other bedroom, and my brother and I made do with a rollaway in the kitchen.

- David Green

I have this system where if I buy three or four new things, I give away three or four things. Sometimes, it’s a very painful system, but shopping is even better when you know that someone else who needs it will be getting. Keep the clothing karma going, I say.

- Sara Blakely

Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.

- Peter Drucker

Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.

- Elon Musk

The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out. The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.

- Seth Godin

I’m a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That’s what I’ve done in my career, one that’s culminated in – at least to this point – playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That’s the Bakken field, which I believe will yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come, maybe more.

- Harold Hamm

Every time I find myself stressed out, it’s because I do things primarily driven by growth.

- Timothy Ferriss

If we can get you a car in five minutes, we can get you anything in five minutes.

- Travis Kalanick

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Look at all the billionaires. If I know 15 billionaires, I know 13 unhappy people.

- Russell Simmons

The reason Steve Herrell’s shop did so well is that it was famous for having a line! People brought folks from out of town to have the experience.

- Seth Godin

Keep the right perspective Some people would love to have your problems. They would gladly trade places with you. They would love to have the job that frustrates you. They would love to sit in traffic in that car you don’t like. They would love to have your husband, who gets on your nerves. They would love to live in the house you think is too small.

- Joel Olsteen

You simply cannot manage people to better performance if you do not give candid, consistent feedback through a system that is loaded with integrity

- Jack Welch

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

- Peter Drucker

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.

- Peter Thiel

The ultimate goal for a business owner is to build a company that he or she can one day sell, continue to scale, or even own passively. Most business owners reach for growth by working harder and personally trying to produce more. This is a flawed model that at best will lead to only moderate growth. At worst this strategy can literally put your entire company at risk.

- Jeff Hoffman

Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.

- Peter Drucker

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