Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.
- James C. Collins
Notable Quotables
I’m surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms.
- Steve Wozniak
When I was a kid a long time ago, when the sun rose, I was outside on my bike. If my parents were lucky – poor parents! – I would be home before it got dark.
- Larry Ellison
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.
- Evan Esar
In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.
- Bill Gates
Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform’s native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Fulfilling the vision of the Irvine Ranch master plan has been a lifetime dedication and lifetime passion, and I am hopeful the heritage of our Irvine stewardship will live on in many new ways.
- Donald Bren
I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, someway, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.
- Joel Olsteen
It is not the rich man’s son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race for life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the dark horse in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office.
- Andrew Carnegie
Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that’s more productive.
- Donald Trump
You cannot expect victory and plan for defeat.
- Joel Olsteen
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If you’re brilliant and undiscovered and underappreciated (in whatever field you choose), then you’re being too generous about your definition of brilliant.
- Seth Godin
Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That’s why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion.
- Patrick M. Lencioni
It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.
- Sara Blakely
A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.
- Peter Thiel
Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn’t an artist, he was a plumber.
- Seth Godin
The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
Hong Kong has gone through countless difficult moments in the past. Our belief in our abilities and our determination to work for a better future have helped us overcome all obstacles.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
- Bill Gates
We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.
- Seth Godin
Nobody’s ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there’s some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.
- Richard Branson
My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
- Michael Gerber
You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it.
- Oprah Winfrey
How much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes?
- Peter Thiel
If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.
- Elon Musk
We should remember it wasn’t so long ago that confidence in New York was in short supply.
- Michael Bloomberg
I know something about how to build constituencies in an independent way.
- Michael Bloomberg
We don’t have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.
- Larry Page
Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.
- Napoleon Hill
Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
- Timothy Ferriss
Practice, practice, PRACTICE in speaking before an audience will tend to remove all fear of audiences, just as practice in swimming will lead to confidence and facility in the water. You must learn to speak by speaking.
- Dale Carnegie
The first three-and-a-half months of calendar year 2001 have been extremely challenging for many of us in high-tech.
- John Chambers
China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.
- Bill Gates
Substantial growth in GDP, rising wages, improved employment prospects and favourable bank mortgage terms have all resulted in a buoyant property market.
- Lee Shau Kee
Don’t sit around depressed and discouraged. Get a new vision for your life.
- Joel Olsteen
It’s absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing (of Wal-Mart putting small stores out of business), as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car, and the dissappearance of the buggy whip makers. The small stores (and DJs) were destined to dissappear, at least in the numbers they once existed., because the whole thing is driven by customers, who are free to choose where to shop.
- Sam Walton
Chance made us sisters. Hearts made us friends.
- Zig Ziglar
It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.
- Ben Horowitz
Wouldn’t it be great to be gifted? In fact… It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You’re not born this way, you get this way.”
- Seth Godin
The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves
- Ray Kroc
The question isn’t ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?
- Mark Zuckerberg
So, if you look at what’s common among some of the companies I have, including the Four Seasons, NewsCorp, George V, the Plaza, these are all irreplaceable brands in their own fields.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett-Packard after the sale of Opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.
- Ben Horowitz
Many people say the privatisation was unfair: that is true – it was unfair. That is a fact: some people became rich and others did not. Unfair does not mean illegal, but it was inevitably unfair.
- Vladimir Potanin
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.
- Warren G. Tracy
I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.
- Bill Gates
School districts in the US don’t adopt technology very quickly.
- Reed Hastings
Run your business in harmony with God’s laws.
- David Green
Self-centered leaders manipulate when they move people for personal benefit. Mature leaders motivate by moving people for mutual benefit.
- John C. Maxwell
We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm.
- Winston Churchill
Trate siempre de que la otra persona se sienta importante.
- Dale Carnegie
The world is still in deleveraging.
- Ray Dalio
You cannot get into business for the fashion of it.
- Azim Premji
China’s open-door policy, the favourable local exchange rates, the growing affluence and changing lifestyles in South Asian countries and burgeoning economic activities in the Asia-Pacific Rim are all conducive factors to the continuing tourism boom.
- Cheng Yu-tung
A factory demands a compliant workforce in order to succeed.
- Seth Godin
EBay is a great company. There are a lot of good assets and good customers, and the U.S. people love it.
- Jack Ma
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
Customers have different need states and life experiences.
- Howard Schultz
The lesson is that, No. 1, this management has to be at the highest class possible. No. 2, they have to have a succession plan.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
- Jeff Bezos
I have far more respect for the person with a single idea who gets there than for the person with a thousand ideas who does nothing….
- Thomas Edison
The Cul-de-Sac ( French for “dead end” ) … is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes.
- Seth Godin
I was always fascinated by the decision-making process and the managerial process and just business in general.
- Ronald Perelman
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.
- Soren Kierkegaard
The first thing I ever invested in was Twitter. Blaine Cook, former CTO, was leaving the company and asked me if I wanted to buy his stock.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.
- Reed Hastings
Monopolists downplay their monopoly status to avoid scrutiny, while competitive firms strategically exaggerate their uniqueness.
- Peter Thiel
Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.
- Napoleon Hill
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.
- Bill Gates
Cruel and Darwinian? Try Fair and Effective.
- Jack Welch
The third way is less common and certainly less of a layup—a culture of integrity, meaning a culture of honesty, transparency, fairness, and strict adherence to rules and regulations. In such cultures, there can be no head fakes or winks. People who break the rules do not leave the company for “personal reasons” or to “spend more time with their families.” They are hanged—publicly—and the reasons are made painfully clear to everyone.
- Jack Welch
If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.
- Zig Ziglar
China will become the IT (information technology) center of the world. We believe in giving something back and truly becoming a Chinese company.
- John Chambers
Chinese consumption, particularly high-end consumption, is booming.
- Wang Jianlin
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
- Thomas Edison
People always underestimate Africa. If you want to follow what’s on ground, you would not want to invest in Nigeria; when you look at it from the patriotism point of view, you will ask yourself: how did those great countries become great?
- Aliko Dangote
Effort is grossly underrated.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Wal-Mart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy – the landlord’s son – out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet. Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart’s growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a Save the Small-Town Merchants deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes of something that has the right to be protected…If you become a large-scale success it’s Katie bar the door. Suddenly, you make a very convenient villian because everybody seems to love shooting at who’s on top.
- Sam Walton
Medicine is the means by which we poor feeble creatures try to keep from dying or aching.
- P.T. Barnum
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
- Dale Carnegie
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
- Winston Churchill
Nobody kicks a dead dog.
- Dale Carnegie
Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.
- Elon Musk
Decisiveness is a characteristic of high performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.
- Brian Tracy
You will never change what you tolerate.
- Joel Olsteen
People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.
- Benjamin Franklin
My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.
- Richard Branson
I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I’m not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.
- Jack Ma
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
Residential property prices will pick up steadily.
- Lee Shau Kee
Definite planning even went beyond the surface of this planet: NASA’s Apollo Program began in 1961 and put 12 men on the moon before it finished in 1972.
- Peter Thiel
It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don’t know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.
- Elon Musk
Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have it depends solely on what you think.
- Dale Carnegie
Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate?
- Larry Page
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.
- Dale Carnegie
If you are going through hell, keep going.
- Winston Churchill
Litigation is the basic legal right which guarantees every corporation its decade in court.
- David Porter
Although I don’t have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.
- Bill Gates
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
- Ben Horowitz
