Notable Quotables

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

- Bill Gates

People shouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to get high-quality clothing.

- Tadashi Yanai

Our lives change in two ways :through the people we meet and the books we read.

- Harvey Mackay

When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.

- Zig Ziglar

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

- Bill Gates

Great music and art are earthly wonders, but I think ‘cubist’ songs and paintings are hideous.

- Thomas Edison

Follow the GOLDEN RULE. Do unto others as you would have them do onto you.

- David Robinson

He will give you strength for every battle, wisdom for every decision, peace that passes understanding. God will vindicate you for the wrongs that have been done. He will pay you back for unfair situations. He promised He will not only bring your dreams to pass but He will give you even the secret desires of your heart. Dare to trust Him. Come back to that place of peace. Quit being worried, stressed out, wondering if it will happen. God has you in the palm of His hand. He has never once failed before, and the good news is He is not about to start now.

- Joel Olsteen

You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.

- Joel Olsteen

When I was at Kingsoft, I was under pressure and worked hard, but the results were not satisfactory.

- Lei Jun

Historians will record 1998 as a time when the impossible happened in Asia

- Cheng Yu-tung

California, in a sense, is almost Starbucks’ largest country, with almost 3,000 stores

- Howard Schultz

When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It’s them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.

- Jack Dorsey

I don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.

- Bill Gates

If we do not have time to do it right the first time when will we have time to come back and do it right again later?

- Lee Cockerell

If you give a good thing to the world, then over time your karma will be good, and you’ll receive good.

- Russell Simmons

Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.

- Winston Churchill

Our underwear used to just be cotton, but we wanted to see if we could create something out of synthetics.

- Tadashi Yanai

When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, ‘Let’s get a better board’ can be helpful.

- Ben Horowitz

I do have my ducks in line if I want to do it, but I’d love to see the Republicans pick somebody that was going to win and take over this country and frankly, to use the expression, ‘Make America great again.’

- Donald Trump

When you are truly interested in other people, you will learn what they are interested in and if they have a need for your product. If they like you, and most people like folks who take an interest in them, they’ll help you find people who do need what you have to sell, even if they don’t.

- Zig Ziglar

You measure your people and you take action on those that don’t measure up.

- Jack Welch

Puffery makes you look weak and not very bright. Representation makes you look strong and smart.

- Jerry Vass

You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.

- Gary Keller

We are currently not planning on conquering the world.

- Sergey Brin

Linchpins are the essential building blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.

- Seth Godin

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.

- Winston Churchill

Don’t kill competition. Competition is healthy for businesses. It keeps you – the entrepreneur – on your toes.

- Aliko Dangote

Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them.

- Harvey Mackay

The formula for handling Inherent Objections: 1. Isolate the Objection 2. Minimize the Objection 3. Offset the Objection with Benefits

- Jerry Vass

I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

- Steve Martin

The great thing is we’re going to have a lot of new facilities, where the others were 10 years old or older. That’s a plus for the fans. The new State Road 20 is going to open. That’s a huge addition for us, probably one of the biggest things that’s happened since we bought the track in 1990.

- Ed Clark

King Alfred’s Book of Laws, or Dooms, as set out in the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia, attempted to blend the Mosaic code with Christian principles and old Germanic customs. He inverted the Golden Rule. Instead of “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”, he adopted the less ambitious principle, “What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men”, with the comment, “By bearing this precept in mind a judge can do justice to all men; he needs no other law-books. Let him think of himself as the plaintiff, and consider what judgment would satisfy him.” The King, in his preamble, explained modestly that “I have not dared to presume to set down in writing many laws of my own, for I cannot tell what will meet with the approval of our successors.

- Winston Churchill

Anger is a waste of energy. Steam which is used to blow off a safety valve would be better used to drive an engine.

- Winston Churchill

The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin.

- Seth Godin

I don’t think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds you know, building their brands, whereas Virgin is already well-known around the world.

- Richard Branson

Positive thinking won’t allow you to do anything, but it will allow you to do everything better than negative thinking will.

- Zig Ziglar

The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.

- P.T. Barnum

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.

- Ben Horowitz

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

- Elon Musk

We should remember it wasn’t so long ago that confidence in New York was in short supply.

- Michael Bloomberg

He had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed.

- Thomas Edison

I influence anybody who is able to get through the chaos of my first impression.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

- Peter Thiel

As he brooded over how to raise the money, he was informed by his father that he had always intended to give each of his children $1,000.00 at age twenty-one, and he now offered to advance John the money. But, John, he added lest his son expect miracles, the rate is ten. Having just retrieved a thousand dollars from Hewitt, Bill might have been looking for a high return on these idle funds. John knew his father too well to plead for a gift and accepted the 10 percent loan, which was higher than the prevailing rate. So on April 1, 1858 backed up by this borrowed money, John D. Rockefeller left Isaac Hewitt and joined the partnership of Clark and Rockefeller at 32 River Street (in Cleveland). At eighteen, he was catapulted to a partner’s rank in a commission house. It was a great thing to be my own employer, said Rockefeller. Mentally I swelled with pride – a partner in a firm with $4,000 capital! The moment was fraught with meaning for him and after his first day at work, he went back to the Cheshire Street house, fell to his knees, and implored the Lord to bless his new enterprise.

- Ron Chernow

There is always plenty of capital for those who can create practical plans for using it.

- Napoleon Hill

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

My advice for an entrepreneur just starting out is to differentiate yourself. Why are you different? What’s important about you? Why does the customer need you?

- Sara Blakely

[On someone with a new idea.] The first thing is to draw it out, program it, play with it and get other people playing with it so you can get feedback right away… Once you get that feedback you know if it’s something you should pursue and give more of your attention to, or if it’s something you should put on the shelf for another da

- Jack Dorsey

The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

- Seth Godin

As Indian companies strive to be globally competitive, they have realized the importance of investing in information technology and networking to adapt quickly to rapidly shifting market transitions.

- John Chambers

If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.

- Seth Godin

When advice is freely given, the receiver is free to use it as he or she sees fit.

- Harvey Mackay

When God puts love and compassion in your heart toward someone, He’s offering you an opportunity to make a difference in that person’s life. You must learn to follow that love. Don’t ignore it. Act on it. Somebody needs what you have.

- Joel Olsteen

Similar to all of you, we would like to see higher growth.

- John Chambers

It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn’t. It’s just the opposite. What I think is brutal and false kindness is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don’t belong – just when the options are limited and they’re putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.

- Jack Welch

Most people want to avoid pain, and discipline is usually painful.

- John C. Maxwell

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

- Andrew Carnegie

If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.

- Rupert Murdoch

We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.

- Howard Schultz

Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good

- Ron Chernow

The market’s going to move with tremendous speed. If there is such a thing as a killer app, video is it.

- John Chambers

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done. That would be you.

- Seth Godin

The love of a foster mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational.

- Winston Churchill

Certainly the caffeine in coffee, whether it’s Starbucks or generic coffee, is somewhat of a stimulant. But if you drink it in moderation, which I think four or five cups a day is, you’re fine.

- Howard Schultz

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

- Jeff Bezos

I am not a person who pursues luxury. I am not like those people who, once they have money, compulsively squander it or show it off.

- Wang Jianlin

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.

- Bill Gates

Learn from the past, but don’t live there. Build on what you know so that you don’t repeat mistakes. Resolve to learn something new every day. Because every 24 hours, you have the opportunity to have the best day of your company’s life.

- Harvey Mackay

If it’s set up in such a way that it breaks the conditionality required by the (International Monetary Fund), I think that would be a step backward.

- John Chambers

Send out a cheerful, positive greeting, and most of the time you will get back a cheerful, positive greeting. It’s also true that if you send out a negative greeting, you will, in most cases, get back a negative greeting.

- Zig Ziglar

Learn to speak God’s favor over every area of your life. Remember, the more favor-minded you are, the more of God’s favor you’re going to experience.

- Joel Olsteen

Remember you’re not entitled to anything. You have to earn your success every day, and you will make mistakes like everyone else.

- Harvey Mackay

The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by.

- Seth Godin

Projections are just bullshit. They’re just guesses.

- Jason Fried

Marketing is the name we use to describe the promise a company makes, the story it tells, the authentic way it delivers on that promise.

- Seth Godin

If you don’t agree with the core principles, which are the premise of that compromise, then you have to have what I call principled confrontation. And so that is the thing that we do that I think can rub some people the wrong way.

- Travis Kalanick

I aim to be pretty – I gave up dressing to be sexy in the eighties.

- Sara Blakely

New information makes new and fresh ideas possible.

- Zig Ziglar

10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.

- Peter Thiel

The Group also continues to be bullish for the long-term prospects for the property market in mainland China…

- Lee Shau Kee

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