The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.
- James C. Collins
Notable Quotables
Sales is a simple conversation where I ask you questions and I relate to your answers.
- Bryan Smith
When the Internet first came, I thought it was just the beacon of freedom. People could communicate with anyone, anywhere, and nobody could stop it.
- Steve Wozniak
We can’t wait for Washington. Business leaders are going to have to galvanize their own constituencies and do everything they can to demonstrate confidence in the economy, and I think that can be contagious.
- Howard Schultz
There is no substitute for hard work.
- Thomas Edison
I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.
- John D. Rockefeller
Media companies focused on things like creating great stories whereas technology companies focused on creating a better way of doing things. We began to think about new ideas and about forming a new company.
- Ben Horowitz
Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone.
- Seth Godin
Much like us, our customers are rigorously working to improve their profitability and capacity for innovation. For us, this means doing everything possible when it comes to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovations – and all that on the basis of the highest quality. After all, quality creates trust – and trust creates orders. In short, we need to constantly become better and better at the high level we are already operating at.
- Elmar Degenhart
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
People stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
- Winston Churchill
The dollar has lost 90% of its value in the last century.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.
- Og Mandino
Within the first year of launching my company, Spanx, I decided to go over to England and cold-call Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges the same way I had cold-called Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s here in the United States.
- Sara Blakely
There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.
- Winston Churchill
There’s a sucker born every minute.
- P.T. Barnum
I try to keep a positive intention and use whatever resources I have to benefit others. I try to create businesses that I think are not hurtful. I try to do things that I think are helpful to the environment, to the animals, and to the planet.
- Russell Simmons
In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?
- Jack Welch
There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.
- Ma Huateng
Customers have different need states and life experiences.
- Howard Schultz
The principle is competing against yourself. It’s about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.
- Steve Young
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Your reaction is, ‘It’s not my fault.’ But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
- Ben Horowitz
Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
- Bill Gates
You always have to give something when you get something.
- Jack Nadel
I want the services to look and sound like the Grammys. It’s not showy, but we represent God, and it should be first class.
- Joel Olsteen
They don’t call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.
- Larry Ellison
Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.
- Ray Kroc
If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if you – the probable outcome is failure.
- Elon Musk
A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.
- Phil Knight
Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
From wherever you are, you can go anywhere you want to go if you pick the right roads to travel.
- Zig Ziglar
I think a newspaper should be provocative, stir ’em up, but you can’t do that on television. It’s just not on.
- Rupert Murdoch
It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great.
- James C. Collins
More people will yell and wave at you to tell you that you forgot to close the gas cap than the amount of people who will stop to tell you that you are going the wrong direction with your life.
- Clay Clark
I got my story, my dream, from America. The hero I had is Forrest Gump… I like that guy. I’ve been watching that movie about 10 times. Every time I get frustrated, I watch the movie. I watched the movie before I came here again to New York. I watched the movie again telling me that no matter whatever changed, you are you.
- Jack Ma
It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer. We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
I don’t know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.
- Steve Ballmer
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
Where I get my energy is: ‘How can I make it better?’
- Sara Blakely
Today is our most precious possession. It is our only sure possession.
- Dale Carnegie
How we respond to the opportunities and challenges of the outside world now determines how much the outside world values us.
- Seth Godin
I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.
- Warren Buffett
The book ‘Do You!’ is about your inner voice. And when you connect to that voice then you – then the freedom comes. And we’re only here to be happy. So happy makes money. Money doesn’t make happy.
- Russell Simmons
It’s always darkest before the dawn.
- Anonymous
Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Unfavorable hereditary back ground.
- Napoleon Hill
I think I’m less afraid of failure than some others.
- Russell Simmons
You may never get to that perfect world that you’re waiting for where everything’s going to be perfect and you got that much money and your house paid off.
- Joel Olsteen
Yields will rise with prices, and this will generate steady income.
- Lee Shau Kee
The ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
- Jack Welch
Life is a classroom — only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class.
- Zig Ziglar
John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there’s something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.
- Ben Horowitz
If he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.
- Peter Thiel
When you have one million dollars, you’re a lucky person. When you have 10 million dollars, you’ve got trouble, a lot of headaches. When you have more than one billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, that’s a responsibility you have – it’s the trust of people on you, because people believe you can spend money better than the others.
- Jack Ma
One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you’ve got somebody who’s raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give ’em that shot.
- Jack Welch
A road that leads to nowhere is hard to build.
- David Novak
Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I’m going to continue fighting for the end user.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Make your desires clear and reduce them to writing.
- Napoleon Hill
I produced Run DMC. I produced some early records, lots of records early on.
- Russell Simmons
Don’t go in and tell somebody else how to run their business.
- Carl Icahn
It is expected that Mainland China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation will materialise in the near future and the country will see further growth in its economy unfolding at a faster pace.
- Lee Shau Kee
Reckless he is. Matters are worse.
- Yoda
So if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested.
- Dale Carnegie
It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
- Peter Thiel
Your best days are still out in front of you.
- Joel Olsteen
Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I’ll trade glib for common sense any day.
- Stephen Wynn
There are only two kinds of employees that I’ve run across in 30 years. There are ones that get results, and ones that make excuses. If you’re in that second camp, you’re not going to like Dish.
- Charles Ergen
It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
- Winston Churchill
Here’s the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don’t you hate that? I love that there’s no map.
- Seth Godin
When you have got a thing where you want, it is a good thing to leave it where it is.
- Winston Churchill
Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.
- Phil Knight
I’m pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don’t see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I’m petrified of being wrong.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The choice to be excellent begins with aligning your thoughts and words with the intention to require more from yourself.
- Oprah Winfrey
For a successful entrepreneur it can mean extreme wealth. But with extreme wealth comes extreme responsibility. And the responsibility for me is to invest in creating new businesses, create jobs, employ people, and to put money aside to tackle issues where we can make a difference.
- Richard Branson
For Africa to move forward, you’ve really got to get rid of malaria.
- Bill Gates
It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you.
- Ben Horowitz
The hazards of imitative competition may partially explain why individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today.
- Peter Thiel
Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: 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. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.
- Peter Thiel
I move onward, the only direction Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection.
- Jay-Z
Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars.
- Rupert Murdoch
I think they are fine. I don’t think you have a choice between iPad models so that’s just saying that the iPad is good … that’s a very different statement (and contrary to the implication) that, if I chose not to upgrade now, less than a year after my last upgrade, then I, Woz, am saying that the new Apple iPad is bad.
- Steve Wozniak
For the employee, the goal is to have full access to necessary information and as much independent decision-making ability as possible. For the entrepreneur, the goal is to grant as much information and independent decision-making ability to employees or contractors as possible.
- Timothy Ferriss
Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation and I will be ruthless.
- Warren Buffett
You are going to survive. And good things are going to start to happen again. And one day you are going to look back and this will not even be such a bad thing.
- Dale Carnegie
The economy is like a machine.
- Ray Dalio
You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.
- Harry Truman
When you supervise something, it is one thing. When you are in the middle of something, there is a different pace of life.
- Vladimir Potanin
Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.
- Bill Gates
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
- Mark Twain
Applause is a receipt, not a bill.
- Dale Carnegie
The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.
- Zig Ziglar
Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don’t love.
- Jack Welch
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be;
- Winston Churchill
If you don’t change the direction you are going, then you’re likely to end up where you’re heading…
- John C. Maxwell
I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.
- Elon Musk
Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.
- Seth Godin
…[if you] use discrimination in the selection of your Master Mind group, your objective will have been half-way reached, even before you begin to recognize it.
- Napoleon Hill
Every morning when I wake up, I make up my mind to solve as many problems before returning home.
- Aliko Dangote
