People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word play to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the “me” prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of “building out my résumé” while people who use the “team” prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal that is separate from the team goal.
- Ben Horowitz
Notable Quotables
The polar opposite business cliché warns that “the best product doesn’t always win.
- Peter Thiel
Laughter is America’s most important export.
- Walt Disney
Life is actually far better than it is in the movies. And it takes longer.
- Seth Godin
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
- Benjamin Franklin
Tomorrow is only found in the calendar of fools.
- Og Mandino
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
Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.
- Elon Musk
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
- Peter Drucker
When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not, hmmmm?
- Yoda
Life is too short for long-term grudges.
- Elon Musk
mean that you can’t do anything else but pray. But it does mean that you are always ready and willing to go before God with any concern or praise. Nothing is too small or too big for prayer. Prayer is simply opening your heart and connecting with God. It’s taking His promises and applying them to your life. Prayer processes the plan of God. You should bathe your life in prayer. Pray for wisdom, peace, and patience. Pray for your relationships, your job, and your children. Pray for your country and leaders. Pray with others, knowing that when two or more are gathered in His name, He is there.
- Joel Olsteen
Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.
- James C. Collins
If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it.
- Peter Drucker
As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Wal-Mart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy – the landlord’s son – out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet. Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart’s growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a Save the Small-Town Merchants deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes of something that has the right to be protected…If you become a large-scale success it’s Katie bar the door. Suddenly, you make a very convenient villian because everybody seems to love shooting at who’s on top.
- Sam Walton
While there were a number of highlights, it was probably the U.S. that topped the highlight list with strong order growth of approximately 20 percent year over year. This is better order growth than we’ve experienced in the last six quarters in the U.S..
- John Chambers
In order to be happy, every individual needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done.
- Peter Thiel
Politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business. Large stores, gilt signs, flaming advertisements, will all prove unavailing if you or your employees treat your patrons abruptly. The truth is, the more kind and liberal a man is, the more generous will be the patronage bestowed upon him.
- P.T. Barnum
Plant a seed of greatness in your children. Speak a word of encourgement to someone who needs to hear it. Inspire someone to be a better person. One day you’ll reap a harvest, and your world will become a better place to live.
- George Foreman
One has to live with the fact that some corporate decisions are going to be wrong. As long as most of the decisions are right.
- Michael Otto
Victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.
- Og Mandino
Let’s realise that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let’s realise that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself o herself, and condemn us in return.
- Dale Carnegie
It is true that integrity alone won’t make you a leader, but without integrity you will never be one.
- Zig Ziglar
Get ready, get ready, get ready, to get ready.
- T.D Jakes
A decade and a half ago an ‘Esquire’ magazine reporter, noting our advertising played up the heros as aspects of great atheletes asked the question, who is your hero? My answer was simple. My college track coach and partner, Bill Bowerman. He had won four national championships, coached more sub four minute milers than anyone when he retired. He was the 1972 Olympic coach yet he insisted he was not a track coach. He was a professor of competitive response.
- Phil Knight
I like to look for patterns in science and life. It’s what I do.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
I had a will to win that come from being raised poor.
- Sam Huff
My first professional job was to sell heavy-duty waterless cookware.
- Zig Ziglar
If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.
- Sam Walton
If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.
- Winston Churchill
An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.
- Seth Godin
We, too, need to be patient, especially when it comes to reaching new goals.
- George Foreman
there has never been a better time for testing the uncommon.
- Timothy Ferriss
You are looking at an economy that most CEOs are going to believe will be a good economy for 2006. Most CEOs are saying they are going to spend both on hiring of people and on technology.
- John Chambers
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. …
- Dale Carnegie
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- John C. Maxwell
If your business is not a brand, it is just a commodity.
- Donald Trump
Consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.
- Seth Godin
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
- Steve Jobs
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
Obama and his attack dogs have nothing but hate and anger in their hearts and spew it whenever possible.
- Donald Trump
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
- Andrew Carnegie
Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.
- Peter Thiel
A productive employee who is kept busy working at his or her job is far more likely to be happy at that job and less likely to look for employment elsewhere.
- Zig Ziglar
Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.
- Peter Thiel
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he’d forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming’s serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit.
- Peter Thiel
No tienes que responder a cada crítica. No tienes que demostrarle nada a nadie. Tan solo permanece por encima y permite que Dios pelee tus batallas por ti.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.
- Joel Olsteen
We bring together the best ideas – turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.
- Jack Welch
I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses.
- Sam Walton
I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.
- Jack Welch
Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.
- John C. Maxwell
I cut the feet out of my control top pantyhose one night, threw them on under my white pants and realized that the toning and shaping was perfect and that the hosiery material is thin enough that I could make shape wear out of it.
- Sara Blakely
The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.
- Dale Carnegie
I learned that people don’t buy anything from unknown stores.
- Tadashi Yanai
Everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it? Even if you don’t consciously agree with that statement, your brain sure does.
- Seth Godin
The part of uranium that’s fissile – when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two – is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.
- Bill Gates
Monotony reveals our limitations.
- Dale Carnegie
It’s clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them.
- Seth Godin
The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers
- Sam Walton
That’s just $30 for two tickets. Racing is a family sport and we strive to make our tickets affordable for any families that want to come watch a race.
- Ed Clark
You cannot let where you are today cause you to get stuck. I’m going to be my best right now. That’s what faith is all about.
- Joel Olsteen
Movies always are open to being remade because times change so much, and the tempo of movies changes. I think of it like a James Bond. They can have different actors play the same role… I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘We want to remake ‘The Jerk’ with so and so.’ And I say, ‘Fine.’ It just doesn’t bother me. It’s an honor actually.
- Steve Martin
Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.
- Russell Simmons
The timing of your decision is just as important as the decision you make.
- John C. Maxwell
The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.
- Elon Musk
War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.
- Winston Churchill
No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.
- Ben Horowitz
I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Optimism is the most important human trait, because it allows us to evolve our ideas, to improve our situation, and to hope for a better tomorrow.
- Seth Godin
Atari is a very sad story.
- Steve Wozniak
It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.
- Sam Walton
It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs. During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.
- Ben Horowitz
This I do know beyond any doubt, Regardless of what you are doing, if you PUMP LONG AND HARD ENOUGH and ENTHUSIASTICALLY ENOUGH, sooner or later the EFFORT will bring forth the REWARD.
- Zig Ziglar
[On the Nike logo] I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.
- Phil Knight
Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!
- Steve Martin
Crash diets don’t work.They don’t work for losing weight, they don’t work for making sales quota and they don’t work for getting and keeping a job.The reason they don’t work has nothing to do with what’s on the list of things to be done (or consumed). No, the reason they don’t work is that they don’t change habits, and habits are where our lives and careers and bodies are made.
- Seth Godin
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
- Steve Jobs
My store, Wine Library, outsells big national chains. How do you think we do it? It started with hustle. I always say that our success wasn’t due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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
The potential for Twitter is spectacular and great.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.
- Jack Canfield
I’m enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.
- Steve Martin
Oracle’s got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP’s got nothin’ but SuccessFactors until 2020.
- Larry Ellison
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
Surprises and reverses can serve as an incentive for great accomplishment. There are no rules here, we’re just trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison
[On working at Nike for 48 years] In those 48 years, I have never had a promotion. but it had its other benefits.
- Phil Knight
When you come in to court as a plaintiff or as a defendant, it is terribly important that you look up at the bench and feel that that person represents you and will understand you, that that person is reflective of our community and of our society.
- Michael Bloomberg
Reality is negotiable.
- Timothy Ferriss
One definition of hope is happy anticipation of something good.
- Joel Olsteen
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The future is sooner and stranger than you think.
- Reid Hoffman
The great news is that God knows everything about you, both good and bad, and He still loves you and values you unconditionally. God does not always approve of our behavior. He is not pleased when we go against his will, and when we do, we always suffer the consequences and have to work with Him to correct our thoughts, words, actions, or attitudes. And while you should work to improve in the areas where you fall short, nothing you do will ever cause God to love you less…or more. His love is a constant you can depend on.
- Joel Olsteen
So sure, start with a slogan. But don’t bother wasting any time on it if you’re merely going for catchy. Aim for true instead.
- Seth Godin
Satisfied, loyal and repeat customers are at the heart of Walmart’s spectacular profit margins, and those customers are loyal to us because our associates treat them better than salespeople in other stores do. So, in the whole Wal-Mart scheme of things, the most important contact ever made is between the associated in the store and the customer. I didn’t catch on to that idea for quite a while. In fact, the biggest single regret in my whole business career is that we didn’t include our associates in the initial, managers-only profit-sharing plan when we took the company public in 1970. But there was nobody around preaching that philosophy in those days, and I guess I was just too worried about my own debt, and in too big a hurry to get somewhere fast. Today, some of our company’s critics would like everybody to believe we started our profit-sharing program and other benefits merely as away to stave off union organizing.
- Sam Walton
We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.
- Michael Bloomberg
A lovely nook of forest scenery, or a grand rock, like a beautiful woman, depends for much of its attractiveness upon the attendance sense of freedom from whatever is low; upon a sense of purity and of romance.
- P.T. Barnum
