I always try to acknowledge what someone’s done well before talking about what could be done better. – David Novak CEO OF Yum! Brands
- David Novak
Notable Quotables
You have enough people against you… be for yourself.
- Joel Olsteen
If you want to build lifelong, loyal friendships, if you want to build trust, learn to protect your family members and friends even when they make mistakes.
- Joel Olsteen
Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.
- James C. Collins
I’ve known entrepreneurs who were not great salespeople, or didn’t know how to code, or were not particularly charismatic leaders. But I don’t know of any entrepreneurs who have achieved any level of success without persistence and determination.
- Harvey Mackay
Sweden is famous for many things – but not fashion.
- Stefan Persson
We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.
- Phil Knight
My kids probably started drinking coffee in their late teens.
- Howard Schultz
We will intensify our efforts to build out our infrastructure overseas and to develop products that are tailored to individual markets
- Sergey Brin
Try to build bridges of understanding. Don’t build higher barriers of misunderstanding.
- Dale Carnegie
What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.
- Steve Martin
Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.
- Ben Horowitz
Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who’s going to build.
- Larry Ellison
[On the Nike logo] I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.
- Phil Knight
Luck plays a role in business but whether you succeed or fail depends on many other factors. I haven’t really had a failure.
- Lui Che Woo
It’s surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn’t feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.
- Larry Ellison
It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.
- Walt Disney
I try to help people with management stuff a lot.
- Ben Horowitz
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
Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.”
- Sam Walton
I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.
- Walt Disney
A stubborn man can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
- Winston Churchill
Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
- Confucius
Success is dependent upon the glands – sweat glands.
- Zig Ziglar
Make your desires clear and reduce them to writing.
- Napoleon Hill
It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.
- Timothy Ferriss
The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.
- Bill Gates
About half of our wives do not work outside the home. The number-one occupation for those wives who do work is teacher.
- Thomas J Stanley
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs
You won’t get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it.
- John Lennon
How many companies have you encountered that articulate a clear ideology at the start of the company, yet cannot articulate a clear idea of what products to make?
- James C. Collins
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
Use every customer point of contact to weave stories about who you are and what your brand stands for.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Establish late-payment penalties as part of your terms and conditions and enforce them.
- Robert Kiyosaki
One evening, intending to ask my host mother to wake me the next morning (okosu), I ask her to violently rape me (okasu). She is very confused.
- Timothy Ferriss
A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person.
- Zig Ziglar
Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.
- Larry Page
Life really happens at intersections.
- Jack Dorsey
No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.
- Michael Bloomberg
I’ve been very lucky. I come from a very close family.
- Richard Branson
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.
- Bill Cosby
In those days he was wiser than he is now, he used to frequently take my advice.
- Winston Churchill
I’m short on New York, long on Silicon Valley.
- Peter Thiel
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- Bill Gates
I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.
- Walt Disney
Don’t blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.
- John D. Rockefeller
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.
- Sam Walton
Every company needs people with different skill sets and passions. But early on, everybody should be willing to wear ten different hats. They can’t have the attitude that something isn’t their job or their responsibility. They have to have the MacGyver mentality and do whatever it takes to get the job done. – Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos)
- Tony Hsieh
The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.
- Debbi Fields
An Enemy Called Average
- Jim Collins
I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it’s time America was run like a business.
- Donald Trump
People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.
- Zig Ziglar
The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
- Peter Thiel
When I was growing up my dad would encourage my brother and me to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, so what did you guys fail at this week? If we didn’t have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he’d high-five me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn’t the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, I didn’t try that because I was scared, that is failure.
- Sara Blakely
There are many different kinds of PCs. You have fixed, virtual, tablets, notebooks, ultrabooks, desktops, workstations. What you find in commercial PCs, business PCs, is that there’s a really long tail of usage on client devices.
- Michael Dell
Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees.
- Putting the Service-Profit Chain To Work - Ja
our skills and talent, but above all, be tenacious. See yourself as victorious–which means never giving up
- Donald Trump
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.
- Reid Hoffman
The sad truth is, if you push hard enough, and if you’re so stubborn that you must have things your way, God will sometimes allow you to undertake a project without His blessing or at the wrong time. The problem with that, of course, is when you start something in your own strength and in your own timing, you’re going to have to finish it and maintain it in your own strength.
- Joel Olsteen
So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.
- Joel Olsteen
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
I’m just always looking forwards. I spend very little time, looking backwards.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
[On the Nike name in 2011] I quite like it now.
- Phil Knight
We need to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what you do to someone, discipline is what you do for someone.
- Zig Ziglar
In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn’t pay my employees well.
- Sam Walton
You may think you’ve got a long way to go, but you need to look back at how far you’ve already come. You may not be everything you want to be but atleast you can thank God that you’re not what you used to be.
- Joel Olsteen
About HBO’s “Silicon Valley”: It’s a Good Show.
- Peter Thiel
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
- Winston Churchill
We were guerilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit.
- Phil Knight
There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.
- Ma Huateng
Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.
- John F. Kennedy
Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources.
- Seth Godin
If you are going to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
Unrelenting confidence was necessary.
- Ben Horowitz
Extolling the virtues of conservation of energy, Churchill advised, “Never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lie down.
- Winston Churchill
True success is when you reach back and bring somebody along with you.
- Joel Olsteen
Being an artist isn’t a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It’s an attitude we can all adopt. It’s a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things, you’re an artist.
- Seth Godin
If you want to be inventive — you have to be willing to fail.
- Jeff Bezos
My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.
- Seth Godin
What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn’t matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn’t matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.
- Timothy Ferriss
I am very optimistic about china’s growth.
- Dhanin Chearavanont
Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.
- John C. Maxwell
Velocity and drive comes from your desire to achieve.
- Jim Cathcart
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
- Winston Churchill
We’re getting hurt, but I’m a long-term investor.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
- Peter Drucker
After my death, I want to be remembered as Africa’s greatest industrialist.
- Aliko Dangote
If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.
- Joel Olsteen
[As a child] I would just question things…
- Elon Musk
You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.
- Jeff Bezos
President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy.
- Harold Hamm
The commercial segment produced the best results.
- John Chambers
There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
- Peter Drucker
It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.
- Thomas Edison
Even today few businessmen understand that research, to be productive, has to be the “disorganizer,” the creator of a different future and the enemy of today. In most industrial laboratories, “defensive research” aimed at perpetuating today, predominates.
- Peter Drucker
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
- Jeff Bezos
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
- Seneca
An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be.
- Steve Martin
