I’d work in the store all day, then take off around closing and drive that windy road over the Mississippi River, and then into Tennessee with an old homemade trailer I had hitched to my car. I’d stuff that car and trailer with whatever I could get good deals on – usually on soft lines, ladies panties and nylons, men’s shirts and I’d bring them back, price them low and just blow that stuff out of the store.
- Sam Walton
Notable Quotables
The good-will of a business which is losing money is not worth much.
- Ron Chernow
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
Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.
- Elon Musk
In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.
- Wang Jianlin
No one is guaranteed a job in this.
- Jack Welch
Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
- Henry Ford
Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Life’s too short” is repeated often enough to be a cliche, but this time it’s true. You don’t have enough time to be both unhappy and mediocre. It’s not just pointless, it’s painful. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
- Seth Godin
Your margin is my opportunity.
- Jeff Bezos
I think that any wealth creates a sense of trusteeship… it is characteristic of the new generation which has created wealth to have some amount of responsibility for it.
- Azim Premji
Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.
- Tadashi Yanai
You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.
- Elon Musk
The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it….
- Thomas Edison
Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.
- Peter Thiel
There’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.
- Ben Horowitz
Save someone’s face once and your influence with him rises. Save his face every time you can, and there is practically nothing he won’t do for you.
- Dale Carnegie
Men want to make women happy.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Religion is all bunk.
- Thomas Edison
That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.
- Ben Horowitz
If you don’t believe in your product, or if you’re not consistent and regular in the way you promote it, the odds of succeeding go way down. The primary function of the marketing plan is to ensure that you have the resources and the where withal to do what it takes to make your product work.
- Jay Conrad Levinson
The Law of the Garbage Truck,” was this: Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me, you’ll be happier.
- Joel Olsteen
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- Bill Gates
MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped: Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining? Was customer satisfaction rising or falling? What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.
- Ben Horowitz
If you’re passionate about something and you work hard, then I think you will be successful.
- Pierre Omidyar
The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
- Henry Kissinger
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
- Richard Branson
Nike is not about going to a ball game. It’s a business.
- Phil Knight
Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking.It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every dayto deliver your message with authority.You should write one.
- Seth Godin
Six out of 10 Americans believe the American dream is dead according to a recent poll.
- CBSNews.com
By June this year, the [Henderson] Group had sold approximately 9,500 residential units totally around HK$21 billion in aggregate value.
- Lee Shau Kee
I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.
- Bill Gates
Xiaomi looks a bit like Apple but is really more like Amazon with some elements of Google.
- Lei Jun
God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.
- Joel Olsteen
They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.
- Thomas Edison
One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.
- Bruce Lee
People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.
- Peter Thiel
It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.
- Warren Buffett
In war and policy one should always try to put oneself in the position of what Bismarck called “the Other Man”. The more fully and sympathetically a Minister can do this the better are his chances of being right. The more knowledge he possesses of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do. But imagination without deep and full knowledge is a snare.
- Winston Churchill
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
Hay una divinidad que forja nuestros fines, por mucho que queramos alterarlos.
- Dale Carnegie
Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You’re not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.
- Seth Godin
If you really believe that you’re making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets – not to have a fair fight.
- Michael Bloomberg
Every right implies a responsibility; Every opportunity, an obligation, Every possession, a duty.
- John D. Rockefeller
Your real boss is the one who walks around under your hat.
- Napoleon Hill
Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.
- Mark Zuckerberg
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
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
[On Square in July 2011] We’re going to make it amazing.
- Jack Dorsey
Government shouldn’t tell you whom to marry.
- Michael Bloomberg
At the same time, we invested more than €4 billion, in property, plant and equipment, software, and research and development. The capital expenditure ratio is again expected to be around 6 percent in the current fiscal year.
- Elmar Degenhart
Instead of trying to use your technology and expertise to make a better product for your users’ standard behavior, experiment with inviting the users to change their behavior to make the product work dramatically better.
- Seth Godin
I think there’s a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
- Ben Horowitz
THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill.
- Peter Thiel
Use your feelings, Obi-Wan, and find him you will.
- Yoda
I didn’t think I would come to this conclusion — but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see.
- Sergey Brin
It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.
- Steve Martin
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
Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.
- Dale Carnegie
In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
- Lee Iacocca
What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away.
- Jack Dorsey
Self-centered leaders manipulate when they move people for personal benefit. Mature leaders motivate by moving people for mutual benefit.
- John C. Maxwell
I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.
- Bill Gates
I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.
- Ray Dalio
Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself.
- Peter Thiel
Poverty and lack of knowledge must be challenged.
- Russell Simmons
To properly value a business, you also have to discount those future cash flows to their present worth, since a given amount of money today is worth more than the same amount in the future.
- Peter Thiel
During the epidemic period of SARS, the Group purchased large quantities of disinfectant materials for donation to the local communities.
- Lee Shau Kee
History recalls the remarkable resilience of the territory’s people.
- Cheng Yu-tung
At its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2 percent of all retail sales in the United States. It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of today’s most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue retailing, and credit card sales. The esteem in which Sears’ management was held shows in this 1964 excerpt from Fortune: “How did Sears do it? In a way, the most arresting aspect of its story is that there was no gimmick. Sears opened no big bag of tricks, shot off no skyrockets. Instead, it looked as though everybody in its organization simply did the right thing, easily and naturally. And their cumulative effect was to create an extraordinary powerhouse of a company.
- Clayton M. Christensen
What we know about the destination resort business is clearly established. But it’s all about one thing, and one thing only. All of the razzmatazz and jazz we hear about facilities and everything else doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s customer experience that determines the longevity and endurance of these enterprises.
- Stephen Wynn
Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.
- Peter Drucker
The Buck Stops Here
- Harry Truman
We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.
- Larry Page
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
Try to look at your weakness and convert it into your strength. That’s success.
- Zig Ziglar
Everything we do is about getting people to be more open, more creative, more courageous.
- Jack Dorsey
I believe it’s important that we use names of endearment that reflect a special feeling for the individual involved.
- Zig Ziglar
if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.
- Dale Carnegie
Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you.
- Jack Welch
Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.
- Elon Musk
Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitate to get in the way if you’re moving.
- Timothy Ferriss
A great business has to have a conscience. You have to know who you are and who you are not.
- Howard Schultz
You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.
- Zig Ziglar
When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
- Bill Gates
Newport Center has become a Mediterranean town. The climate here is the same as the Mediterranean’s, and so is the architecture. This center exudes a radiance, an energy. It will become a special way of life for everyone.
- Donald Bren
Here’s to the crazy ones…The ones who see things differently. They push thehuman race forward. And while some may see them as thecrazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
- Steve Jobs
Monotony is the awful reward of the careful.
- A. G. Buckham
If GE’s strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.
- Jack Welch
For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them” (Matthew 25:29).
- Peter Thiel
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
A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.
- Steve Wozniak
The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.
- Peter Drucker
Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.
- Peter Thiel
Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.
- Seth Godin
What has habit been doing to me?
- Dale Carnegie
Everything in life is luck.
- Donald Trump
Boadicea then turned upon Verulamium (St Albans). Here was another trading centre, to which high civic rank had been accorded. A like total slaughter and obliteration was inflicted. “No less”, according to Tacitus, “than seventy thousand citizens and allies were slain” in these three cities. “For the barbarians would have no capturing, no selling, nor any kind of traffic usual in war; they would have nothing but killing, by sword, cross, gibbet, or fire.” These grim words show us an inexpiable war like that waged between Carthage and her revolted mercenaries two centuries before. Some high modern authorities think these numbers are exaggerated; but there is no reason why London should not have contained thirty or forty thousand inhabitants, and Colchester and St Albans between them about an equal number. If the butcheries in the countryside are added the estimate of Tacitus may well stand. This is probably the most horrible episode which our Island has known. We see the crude and corrupt beginnings of a higher civilisation blotted out by the ferocious uprising of the native tribes. Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.
- Winston Churchill
Don’t blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.
- John D. Rockefeller
Your first projects aren’t the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn – you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.
- Steve Wozniak
