Meeting Coach Wooden, the most humble leader I’ve ever met, made me think about my ego, about as the wise John Weinberg once put it, the difference between growing and swelling.
- David Novak
Notable Quotables
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
If you don’t set the tone for the day, the devil will set it for you.
- Joel Olsteen
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
If I had to do it over again, I would have done the same but earlier. It is never too early to start something. The sooner you begin, the sooner you get your experience.
- Warren Buffett
You cannot expect to live a positive life if you hang with negative people.
- Joel Olsteen
I like to live in the past. I don’t think people are going to get much fun in the future.
- Winston Churchill
True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller
Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.
- John C. Maxwell
There is no education like adversity.
- Benjamin Disraeli
I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.
- John D. Rockefeller
Cisco will be well placed to continue building our presence in India as a critical part of our research and development efforts and as domestic market for networking products and solutions continues to expand.
- John Chambers
A lot of advertising has gotten worse. I think it’s kind of lost its nerve, to be honest with you. I feel like the advertising of the ’60s, they were nervier. You know why? Because there was less at stake.
- Jerry Seinfeld
In the early days, I really felt the pain of not being able to find information easily. I guess that helped me to develop an urge to write things like a search engine.
- Robin Li
Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.
- Peter Drucker
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
- Confucius
I hate nobody except Hitler–and that is professional.
- Winston Churchill
Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.
- Jerry Seinfeld
It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
- Jerry Seinfeld
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
The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.
- Henry Ford
Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but only men of character are trusted.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m a physician. I’ve been blessed with ideas and resources to use technology to make the world a better place. That’s what I would like to leave behind.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.
- Napoleon Hill
You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.
- Jack Ma
Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.
- Jack Welch
I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players…I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other. Because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates.
- Steve Jobs
We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Small businesses don’t exist without the nucleus.
- Bryan Smith
I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.
- Seth Godin
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
It’s a matter of invitations versus context. Twitter is really good at providing context, like, I’m having coffee at Third Rail Coffee.’ Foursquare is about invitations to places. In this respect Foursquare has started to replace Yelp for me.
- Jack Dorsey
It is confidence in our bodies, minds and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures, new directions to grow in, and new lessons to learn – which is what life is all about.
- Oprah Winfrey
[That was the case Wednesday night, when Cisco executives talked about results for the fiscal second quarter (which closed on Jan. 26). Chambers and chief financial officer Larry Carter spoke only about the next quarter, when revenue growth from the second fiscal quarter is expected to be nil or in the low single digits.] Our visibility is still very limited, … If there’s one lesson we’ve learned over the past year, it’s how quickly things can change.
- John Chambers
I love people, and the hustle.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The world’s major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.
- Tadashi Yanai
When we put $4 billion into the U.S. economy, they were OK with this. When we preserved jobs in Dearborn, or preserved jobs in Columbus, or preserved jobs in Pennsylvania, everyone was happy.
- Alexei Mordashov
We were trading things before we were using language to communicate.
- Jack Dorsey
Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.
- Yoda
The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- Winston Churchill
To be always intending to make a new and better life but never to find time to set about it is as to put off eating and drinking and sleeping from one day to the next until you’re dead.
- Og Mandino
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
- Thomas Edison
Why should I clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I acquire.
- Henry Ford
When you are committed to doing what’s right, you are sowing seeds for God’s blessings. You will never go wrong by taking the high road and doing more that is required.
- Joel Olsteen
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
Lack of Controlled Sexual Urge.
- Napoleon Hill
He looks like a female llama who has just been surprised in her bath.
- Winston Churchill
If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.
- Dave Ramsey
I think George Will is somebody that said recently that the Republicans will not lose, as a Republican, that the Republicans will not win the election. I think it was a terrible statement.
- Donald Trump
And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.
- Winston Churchill
If the Starbucks secret is a smile when you get your latte… ours is that the Web site adapts to the individual’s taste.
- Reed Hastings
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
I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed…You only have to be right once…I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.
- Mark Cuban
I run a bunch of charities and I say this line to people: ‘I am somebody who has always been helped.’ A little thing like that can make people believe it.
- Russell Simmons
If you’re going to have to swallow a frog, you don’t want to have to look at that sucker too long!
- Zig Ziglar
We’re pleased with the solid revenue and earnings per share results Cisco delivered during its second quarter, but also especially pleased with our strong order momentum. This proves our strategy is working in terms of the convergence of voice, video and data along with our balanced approach to our customer segments, core and advanced technologies, business and technology architecture and key geographic theaters.
- John Chambers
The potential financial reward for building the ‘next Windows’ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.
- Bill Gates
TV is a great big megaphone,” and when you can only afford to spend dozens of dollars acquiring a new customer, you need the biggest megaphone you can find.
- Peter Thiel
Know your numbers’ is a fundamental precept of business.
- Bill Gates
If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.
- Peter Thiel
Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better.
- Peter Thiel
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
- Stephen R. Covey
With our feet to the fire, we needed to produce, in the course of the deal we figured out how to buy, how to sell, and how to finance a transaction.
- Jack Nadel
Hedgehog Concept—disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought.
- James C. Collins
To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can’t stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do ‘anything.’ If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.
- Zig Ziglar
The mistake that’s so easy to make is to get greedy as you choose your hive, to say, “this product is for everyone” or “anyone can benefit from this idea.” Well, there are seven billion people on the planet, so it’s unlikely your comment is correct; even if it is, there’s little chance that a virus would spread across a hive that big.
- Seth Godin
Its never too late…to start heading in the right direction.
- Seth Godin
Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.
- Theodore Roosevelt
My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.
- Larry Page
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
- Ben Horowitz
I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.
- John C. Maxwell
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
- Yoda
Good communication is a give-and-take proposition. Don’t think of your pitch as a short speech, after which you get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
- Michael Levine
I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.
- Winston Churchill
You read these management books that say, ‘These are the hard things about running a company.’ But those aren’t really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.
- Ben Horowitz
Keep something in front of you Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for.
- Joel Olsteen
It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don’t feel like an oligarch.
- Vladimir Potanin
Nobody enjoys the ‘little show about nothing’ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Too often, that solution is nothing more than adding another layer. What you should be doing is going to the source of the problem to fix it, and sometimes that requires shooting the culprit,
- Sam Walton
When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.
- Elon Musk
You need to take pride in what God has given you.
- Joel Olsteen
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known
- Walt Disney
We also now believe that this slowdown in capital spending could extend beyond two quarters.
- John Chambers
I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.
- Og Mandino
Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
- Steven Wright
Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.
- Winston Churchill
Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth…. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
- Viktor E. Frankl
You can’t fault government for seizing that opportunity. But it has an impact on Barbados’ current account deficit and it does bring with it attended risks. And, therefore, you have to ask whether or not the tourism business that is going to be generated from the publicity around the cricket matches will be sustained after the cricket matches are over.
- John Chambers
I’ve been blessed to find people who are smarter than I am, and they help me to execute the vision I have.
- Russell Simmons
We are focusing on the increasing need for mobility and growing demand from our industrial customers. The production volume for vehicles weighing up to six tons is expected to rise to between 100 million and 105 million vehicles. Furthermore, installation of electronics and software will continue to grow substantially, driven by growing demands from end-users and increasingly strict legal requirements for safety and energy consumption. It is partly on this basis that we are aiming for profitable sales of over €50 billion in 2020.
- Elmar Degenhart
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.
- Bill Gates
Customers are the reason we open our doors every day, and keep the machines humming all night long. Customers determine what we eat, where we live, whether we stay in business.
- Harvey Mackay
When I was growing up, I always knew I’d be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.
- Sergey Brin
For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.
- Steve Wozniak
Mormonism is a little different, but I still see them as brothers in Christ.
- Joel Olsteen
During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened.
- Winston Churchill
Real change rarely comes from the front of the line. It happens from the middle or even the back. Real change happens when someone who cares steps up and takes what feels like a risk. People follow because they want to, not because you can order them to.
- Seth Godin
We, we – as I say, ,we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that indutjrises are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.
- Richard Branson
