Notable Quotables

People don’t want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video.

- Bill Gates

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

- Elon Musk

It has been almost a decade since the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. Hong Kong has gone through both good times and bad times. During the past decade, Hong Kong has undoubtedly played an increasingly important role in the economic development of China.

- Cheng Yu-tung

A successful manager told me that stopped wearing a watch. She found that the work was so immersive, anchoring it to whatever hour it happened to be was pointless. The watch reminded her of the rigors of appointments and the status quo, while her goal was to be there, right here, right now, in the moment, and to do the work in front of her. The watch had no role in doing that right, so, for now, it’s gone.

- Seth Godin

A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren’t dependent on Washington doing something different.

- Bill Gates

Isn’t it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?

- Zig Ziglar

Personal initiative is the power that inspires the completion of that which one begins. It is the power that starts all action. No person is free until he learns to do his own thinking and gains the courage to act on his own.

- Napoleon Hill

I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

- Bill Gates

Around the survivors a perimeter create.

- Yoda

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

- Peter Drucker

Successful leadership calls for mastery of details of the leader’s position.

- Napoleon Hill

The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.

- James C. Collins

Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.

- Zig Ziglar

Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Purpose is a soft virtue — but it’s what gives you steel in your spine.

- Rich Karlgaard

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

- Bill Gates

As much as I love crisp, clean whites, there’s always a time for rich but balanced Chardonnays with oak, especially at Thanksgiving.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

I don’t focus on the critics. Everyone who is making any difference in any field has critics. As long as I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, then I don’t worry about it.

- Joel Olsteen

Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all of life’s blessings.

- Oprah Winfrey

It’s true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime.

- John C. Maxwell

There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.

- Winston Churchill

In Russia, or anywhere, people don’t like rich people. Yeah, OK, I have money, but the question is how I use it. It’s not easy, believe me; it’s not easy.

- Viktor Vekselberg

If you believe in quality, you can’t just tell everybody We believe in quality! You’ve got to pay bonuses based on quality. You’ve got to let everyone in the organization know that they are being judged on quality.

- Jack Welch

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

In tennis, you strike a ball just after the rebound for the fastest return. It’s the same with investment.

- Masayoshi Son

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

- Mark Zuckerberg

ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

- Peter Thiel

It takes a leader to create momentum. Followers catch it. And managers are able to continue it once it has begun. But creating it requires someone who can motivate others, not who needs to be motivated. Harry Truman once said, If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. But for leaders, that statement should be changed to, If you can’t make some heat, get out of the kitchen.

- John Maxwell

Being educated in the United States gave me a good understanding of American culture. I think I got a lot of influence from the entrepreneurial mind in the United States.

- Masayoshi Son

I am looking to buy companies that are run by painters. Most great artists have a hard time letting go of their paintings. That’s because the joy is not in the finished work, the joys is in the painting. They are constantly adding a dab of color here, a little more texture there. I’m looking for the boss who is always tweaking his company, constantly trying to make it better. No matter how successful he may have already been, what he still sees is a master-piece-in-progress.

- Warren Buffett

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

The reason we love our parents is because they loved us first. Every single company should take this advice.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

We want to do a lot of stuff, we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.

- Jerry Seinfeld

It’s harder, but we’re still finding oil in Oklahoma today. The bar has been raised on startup companies, but it can still be done. Every regulation and every rule limits you, but, yes, it can still be done. That’s the beauty of living in a free country and having the freedom to have an idea and become an entrepreneur.

- Harold Hamm

Building solid relationships in business is about helping others succeed and moving their efforts forward. This benefits both parties. Relationships are built easily, naturally, and profitably when you focus on helping the other party…

- 2014)

Don’t let any opportunity lead you away from serving God. That’s a price that’s too high to pay.

- George Foreman

Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.

- Rupert Murdoch

If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.

- John C. Maxwell

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

- Peter Thiel

Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.

- Thomas Edison

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

- Peter Drucker

I come back to the same thing: We’ve got the greatest pipeline in the company’s history in the next 12 months, and we’ve had the most amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we’re predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year ’06.

- Steve Ballmer

We don’t have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.

- Larry Page

God is faithful to His word. All of His promises are Yes” and Amen.” That means if you will do your part and believe even though it looks impossible, and not let your mind, your emotions, or other people talk you out of it, then God promises in due season and at the right time He will bring it to pass. It may not happen the way you expect it or on your timetable, but God is a faithful God. It will happen.

- Joel Olsteen

The internet population is going up and up. I am confident that this will be a huge market.

- Robin Li

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

- Winston Churchill

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

I spend a lot of time reading.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft

- Bill Gates

PR is gift-wrapping. If you package a bracelet in a Tiffany box, it will have a higher perceived value than if you presented it in a Kmart box.

- Michael Levine

I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don’t believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.

- Ronald Perelman

Always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.

- Og Mandino

Well, we have to provide the world’s best schools. We certainly don’t have them, but that’s our objective.

- Michael Bloomberg

Ten or twelve men, especially between brothers and between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as the children of the man with whom a particular woman cohabited first.

- Winston Churchill

The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.

- Larry Ellison

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 aren’t going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants,

- James L. Heskett

Get through your fears and the world will open up. Give in to your fears and your world will get smaller every year.

- Robert Kiyosaki

The public is upset. If they haven’t lost their job, they know somebody that has. If they haven’t lost their house, they know somebody that has. What do you do? When something’s wrong, it’s government’s job to fix it, it must be government that’s responsible for causing it.

- Michael Bloomberg

In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you’re going to be 20 years from now is how well you’re doing in your education system.

- Bill Gates

Worry is the most significant factor that relates to the root of negative thinking.

- Zig Ziglar

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.

- Napoleon Hill

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.

- Peter Drucker

Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.

- Dale Carnegie

If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.

- Jeff Bezos

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.

- Thomas Edison

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Much about success is just the result of simply the ability to follow up, follow through, and finish what we started.

- Zig Ziglar

When you develop yourself to the point where your belief in yourself is so strong that you know that you can accomplish anything you put your mind to, your future will be unlimited.

- Brian Tracy

It’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty that we’re totally out of it (the dry pattern), and it’s going to shift. But it’s leaning in that direction.

- Ed Clark

We’re seeing an explosion in new approaches, new models and new forms of interaction. This growth comes from change, insight and exploration, not obedience.

- Seth Godin

While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.

- Ray Kroc

Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you’ll create credit… So you reach a certain point that that you can’t do that anymore… There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

- Ray Dalio

I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it’s hard to get them out on the air.

- Steve Martin

Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.

- Bill Gates

If you learn to pray bold prayers… it allows God to do big things in your life.

- Joel Olsteen

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

- Winston Churchill

The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.

- Jack Welch

I’d never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn’t exist.

- Sara Blakely

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The service leaders hire one out of 50 applicants, sometimes one out of 100, but they’re very, very careful. You can’t afford not to be extremely choosy when you hire.

- Harvey Mackay

The safest plan, and the one most sure of success for the young man starting in life, is to select the vocation which is most congenial to his tastes.

- P.T. Barnum

Wanamaker learned this lesson early, but I personally had to blunder through this old world for a third of a century before it even began to dawn upon me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticise themselves for anything no matter how wrong it may be.

- Dale Carnegie

You have to BE before you can DO, and DO before you can HAVE.

- Zig Ziglar

CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.

- Peter Thiel

If this market transition truly evolves the way that I think it’s most likely to, the worst decision you could make is not to move.

- John Chambers

What I mean is that none of my talents had a – what’s that great word – rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer – there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I’m a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.

- Steve Martin

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

- Steve Jobs

Every job you take is a gamble that could increase your options or shut them down.

- Jack Welch

I’ve traveled around the world, and what’s so revealing is that, despite the differences in culture, politics, language, how people dress, there is a universal feeling that we all want the same thing. We deeply want to be respected and appreciated for our differences.

- Howard Schultz

When I became proficient as a salesman I was invited to teach new hires.

- Zig Ziglar

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