I like winning. There’s also a certain joy in it. I feel fulfilled by it.
- Carl Icahn
Notable Quotables
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
- Elon Musk
Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
- Bill Gates
People have come to the erroneous conclusion that if they’re not willing to start something separate, world-changing, and risky, they have no business starting anything. Somehow, we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that the project has to have a name, a building, and a stock ticker symbol to matter.
- Seth Godin
I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people’s eyes.
- Jack Ma
I think the acquisition of consumers might be on the verge of being mapped. The battlefield is going to be retention and lifetime value.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it.
- Aliko Dangote
Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.
- Peter Drucker
Why settle for the ‘get by’ when in the long run the good costs less?
- Zig Ziglar
There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
We must remember that our children are very much what we make them.
- Dale Carnegie
If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.
- Harvey Mackay
No, I’m not settling here. I’m going to keep pressing forward.
- Joel Olsteen
Courage is on display every day, and only the courageous wring the most out of life.
- Zig Ziglar
Yes, iD is a machine vision and sensor browser for the physical world. That’s what we have been working on with Coca-Cola, Verizon, Bank of America and Disney to launch content when an image is recognised.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
Cuando dos socios siempre están de acuerdo, uno de ellos no es necesario.
- Dale Carnegie
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
- Henry Ford
Branding is what people think about you before they even know you.
- Bryan Smith
It it impossible to comprehend Rockefeller’s breathtaking ascent without realizing that he always moved into battle backed by adundant cash. Whether riding out downturns or coasting on booms, he kept plentiful reserves and won many bidding contests simply because his war chest was deeper. Rockefeller vividly described the way he had hastily enlisted the aid of bankers to snap up one rifinery: It required many hundreds of thousands of dollars and in cash, securities would not answer. I received the message at about noon, and had to get off on the 3 o’clock train. I drove from bank to bank asking each president or cashier, whomever I could find first, to get ready for me all the funds he could possibly lay hands on. I told them I would be back to get the money later. I rounded up all of our banks in the city, and made a secondary journey to get the money, and kept going until I secured the necessary amount. With this I was off on the 3 o’clock train and closed the transaction.
- Ron Chernow
By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
- Ben Horowitz
People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
- Ben Horowitz
When I hire someone, I try to get beneath the surface and go deep. The first question I ask is, Has this person demonstrated any leadership potential? I ask for specifics and probe carefully to find out exactly what that person contributed. After all, success has many fathers.’ I also look for enthusiasm, people who lean forward in their chairs, who get up on their haunches a little but when they talk about what they’ve done. I like to see the passion and the excitement because that’s what will allow someone to inspire others. The next thing I look for is an avid learners, someone who is curious, who has an ability to make connections, to pick up on trends, and to apply what’s going on in the rest of the world to his or her business career. You obviously need smart people with a proven track record, but the real stars are passionate about what they do and are avid learners. Those two things make people continually raise the bar on performance.
- David Novak
I don’t know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.
- Sam Walton
Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.
- Joel Olsteen
If failure is not an option, then neither is success.
- Seth Godin
It’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s how you respond to what happens to you that makes a difference.
- Zig Ziglar
Competition is a sin.
- John D. Rockefeller
I am a man who has always needed heros.
- Phil Knight
The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.
- Jack Welch
If you say too much or mix in multiple pitches, you diffuse your goal. You must give the media a pitch they can hit.
- Michael Levine
“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”
- Sam Walton
We have a go-to-hell fund. In other words, we have accumulated enough wealth to live without working for ten or more years. Thus, those of us with a net worth of $1.6 million could live comfortably for more than twelve years. Actually, we could live longer than that, since we save at least 15 percent of our earned income.
- Thomas J Stanley
Bordeaux would be naive not to recognize that Robert Parker was driving the brand equity. If the next generation doesn’t care about Chateau Pichon-Lalande, then you have a problem.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
China is investing in factories in Eastern Europe, not because their labor costs are lower, but because they want to be closer to their markets.
- Michael Bloomberg
If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: ‘Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?’ From what I’ve seen, it’s not likely.
- Timothy Ferriss
We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.
- Jerry Seinfeld
It is always your next move.
- Napoleon Hill
I’m a big fan of Mashable and TechCrunch and other outlets like that, but TechMeme obviously does an amazing job of aggregating.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
You can’t build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.
- Rupert Murdoch
[In 1998] The Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse.
- Phil Knight
The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
- Thomas Edison
Doing the wrong thing daily, compounds over time.
- John C. Maxwell
All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
- Walt Disney
The led must not be compelled. They must be able to choose their own leader.
- Albert Einstein
Treat them (the employees) well, but see that they work.
- John D. Rockefeller
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.
- Winston Churchill
Bell took the opposite approach, building multiple restaurants in a single neighborhood to eliminate the competition. It’s a strategy that’s widely used today by many companies like Starbuck’s, Barnes & Noble, and many others, and it worked for Bell.
- David Novak
Our goal here in New York is to ensure that every child who graduates high school is ready to start a career or start college and to dramatically increase the number of students that graduate from college.
- Michael Bloomberg
Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.
- Peter Drucker
Every man should make his son or daughter learn some useful trade or profession, so that in these days of changing fortunes of being rich today and poor tomorrow they may have something tangible to fall back upon. This provision might save many persons from misery, who by some unexpected turn of fortune have lost all their means.
- P.T. Barnum
The more we share what’s happening around us, the more we understand how someone lives their life. The greater the understanding we have, the more empathy we have for each other. By and large, that reduces conflicts.
- Jack Dorsey
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
- Steve Ballmer
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
- Ben Horowitz
Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.
- Dale Carnegie
People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.
- Elon Musk
We must … balance the fact that innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints, and enable new services.
- John Chambers
We sell tea in Starbucks, but I think the experience is very different. I think coffee is something that is quick – it’s transactional. I think tea is more Zen-like. It requires a different environment.
- Howard Schultz
End-user buyers re-emerged in the market at a time when local commercial banks were keen to offer preferential terms for home mortgage loan business.
- Lee Shau Kee
The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important.
- James C. Collins
Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.
- John C. Maxwell
Be kind.
- Jack Dorsey
Advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away, it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.
- Peter Thiel
Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.
- Timothy Ferriss
The POSITIVE THINKER sees the INVISIBLE, feels the INTANGIBLE, and achieves the IMPOSSIBLE.
- Winston Churchill
Wal-Mart’s leaders had obviously made a point of educating and informing everyone at all levels about all aspects of the company, and that shows a real respect for their people.
- David Novak
Without courage all other virtues lose their meaning.
- Winston Churchill
We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.
- Dale Carnegie
Who am I winning for? Am I winning for Oracle shareholders or is it simply a matter of personal vanity? I’ll admit to it. Mea culpa. An awful lot of it is personal vanity.
- Larry Ellison
A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.
- John D. Rockefeller
Did you know that nearly one in three children live apart from their biological dads? Those kids are two to three times more likely to grow up in poverty, to suffer in school, and to have health and behavioral problems.
- Tony Dungy
I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.
- Henry Ford
One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that good ones slip through.
- Seth Godin
Feel the force!
- Yoda
There is no substitute for hard work. There is no such thing as overnight success or easy money.
- Henry Sy
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
- Jack Welch
People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.
- Peter Drucker
In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.
- Bill Gates
All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.
- Napoleon Hill
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
I’m a huge believer in clarity.
- Ben Horowitz
The chef that grew up with the grandma who cooks tends to always beat the chef that went to the culinary institute. It’s in the blood.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Though the external environment is still fraught with uncertainties, mainland China, which has been less affected by the global financial tsunami, is expected to keep growing from strength to strength despite fine tuning of its moderately loose monetary policy on concerns of overheating in the property sector and inflation risk.
- Lee Shau Kee
We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.
- Winston Churchill
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
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
I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.
- John D. Rockefeller
Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.
- Jerry Seinfeld
What’s happening is that the two groups assume that the nature of the debate is really a matter of disagreement about their own sides’ core issues. Each side is assuming that people in the other group oppose what they hold most dear to themselves – what’s most important to their side – but in fact their adversaries really don’t oppose them.
- John Chambers
Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.
- Napoleon Hill
Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
- Peter Drucker
If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.
- Elon Musk
You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
- Walt Disney
What has sustained us through these years? Trust. Dedication. Discipline.
- Cheng Yu-tung
When you are tough on yourself, life is going to be infinitely easier on you.
- Zig Ziglar
You have to be a crazy guy and a little eccentric to be very successful.
- Tadashi Yanai
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
- Peter Drucker
Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.
- Peter Thiel
If you’re not one or two in the market, you don’t make money. The market leaders make the money.
- Jack Welch
Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.
- Peter Thiel
