Another noteworthy aspect is the strong free cash flow of more than €2 billion. This enabled us to reduce net indebtedness to its lowest level since 2006.
- Elmar Degenhart
Notable Quotables
We are very happy to be reporting that our pro-forma earnings passed the $1 billion mark for the first time.
- John Chambers
Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls– family, health, friends, integrity– are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered
- Gary Keller
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.
- Warren G. Tracy
Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.
- P.T. Barnum
Did you eat half an Oreo cookie? No problem. If you’re a 220-pound male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.
- Timothy Ferriss
Action springs out of what we fundamentally desire.
- Dale Carnegie
Enjoyment is an incredible energizer to the human spirit.
- John C. Maxwell
The freedom of the new kind of work (which most of us do, most of the time) is that the tasks are vague and difficult to measure. We can waste an hour surfing the ’Net because no one knows if surfing the ’Net is going to help us make progress or connections. This freedom is great, because it means no one is looking over your shoulder; no one is using a stopwatch on you. This freedom is a pox, because it’s an opening for the resistance. Freedom like this makes it easy to hide, easy to find excuses, easy to do very little.
- Seth Godin
In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.
- Clayton M. Christensen
I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”
- Ben Horowitz
Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.
- Napoleon Hill
Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.
- Peter Thiel
We are pleased to look back at another extremely successful financial year 2014 during which we achieved our targets.
- Elmar Degenhart
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
We believe the competitive and economic environment will remain very challenging in the year ahead. Whilst we think we have the opportunity to make improvements to some of our ranges, we are still budgeting on the basis of negative like-for-like retail sales for the year.
- Simon Wolfson
I deal with more practical issues of the Bible.
- Joel Olsteen
I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
- Winston Churchill
In Riyadh, there’s going to be a huge project that will house at least 12,000 units with inhabitants of approximately 150,000 people. It’s like a city within a city.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Reality is negotiable.
- Timothy Ferriss
Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to become successful.
- Zig Ziglar
I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.
- Oprah Winfrey
Anyone that makes me a quarter of a billion dollars, I like.
- Carl Icahn
Many businesses forget that a crucial part of cash flow is managing your own bill paying. Make sure you pay your bills promptly. Ask for extended terms up front. After you have paid timely for two or three months, ask for additional extensions on your payable terms. A supplier will usually extend credit for 30 to 90 days to a good customer.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.
- Larry Ellison
By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.
- Dale Carnegie
Every setback means you’re one step closer to seeing the dream come to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.
- Winston Churchill
Thee may be some concern about rising inflation, shortage of labour and increased trade protectionism but the economy is generally in good shape.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.
- Bill Gates
When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
- Warren Buffett
If Google Books is successful, others will follow.
- Sergey Brin
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been
- Sam Walton
We are seeing the beginning of things. Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second.
- Reed Hastings
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
Potential means that you haven’t done it yet.
- David Novak
One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That’s why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
- Ben Horowitz
If he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.
- Peter Thiel
The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
- Napoleon Hill
Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.
- Steve Ballmer
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
- Henry Ford
We have a big opportunity in China. We think the number of stores here can rival the number in North America.
- Howard Schultz
We’re not in the hamburger business. We’re in show business.
- Ray Kroc
Success is…knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.
- John C. Maxwell
I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
- Bill Gates
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.
- Peter Thiel
But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
- Peter Thiel
The problem with common sense is that it’s not really that common. – David Novak CEO of Yum! Brands
- David Novak
Control, control, you must learn control!
- Yoda
People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
What is Oracle? It’s people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.
- Larry Ellison
From my experience, there are so many regulations for investing in the United States that they become an impediment, a barrier to investing.
- Michael Otto
Who you associate with makes a difference in how far you go in life.
- Joel Olsteen
Money doesn’t make people happy. People make people happy.
- Stephen Wynn
I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living.
- John D. Rockefeller
Last I looked – and I’m not a candidate – but last time I checked reading about the Constitution, the Electoral College has nothing to do with parties, has absolutely nothing to do with parties. It’s most states are winners take all.
- Michael Bloomberg
Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.
- Bill Gates
The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.
- Jeff Bezos
Developing a customer who loves the business so much that they become an unpaid and passionate marketer for the company.
- Clay Clark
The biggest part of my job now is to quickly develop successors, and around the world I am working to develop new business leaders in the company.
- Tadashi Yanai
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
A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.
- Abraham Lincoln
A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
- Peter Drucker
Twitter in 2000 was something that was fun to play with but something I put on the shelf to play with for another day. And that day was 2006.
- Jack Dorsey
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
- Colin Powell
Structure a deal and create a plan around it.
- Jack Nadel
When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.
- Rupert Murdoch
Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.
- James C. Collins
Science is the pursuit of pure truth, and the systematizing of it.
- P.T. Barnum
Many residents have grown more cynical about government, … Sure, I want my constituents to feel good about me as their legislator, but we have to do something to restore the public’s faith in government.
- Michael Gerber
The austerity policies for the mainland property market will remain intact in 2011.
- Lee Shau Kee
I think the most important thing that I think everyone in America must have is belief that wherever they live, whatever station they have in life, that the American dream is alive and well. I think the fracturing of trust and confidence is in the American dream.
- Howard Schultz
Let’s test the Shakespearean model in the real world. Imagine a production called Gates and Schmidt, based on Romeo and Juliet. Montague is Microsoft. Capulet is Google. Two great families, run by alpha nerds, sure to clash on account of their sameness.
- Peter Thiel
We should remember it wasn’t so long ago that confidence in New York was in short supply.
- Michael Bloomberg
Whatever you accept your employees will expect.
- Clifton Taulbert
You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It’s starting to really become a cool thing for young people.
- Russell Simmons
If you want to understand what drives Cisco, look at our approach to customers. The manner in which we serve our customers defines our company values and demonstrates our priorities. Cisco is proud to be honored with this important certification that recognizes the foundation of our culture — the importance that we place on ensuring our customers are successful with Cisco technology.
- John Chambers
I would rather hire a man with enthusiasm than a man who knows everything.
- John D. Rockefeller
If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value
- Warren Buffett
If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.
- Sam Walton
As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.
- Donald Trump
A remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers and warmed and cheered all our hearts.
- Winston Churchill
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- Bill Gates
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.
- Wayne Gretzky
He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.
- Ray Dalio
How has being realistic” or responsible” kept you from the life you want? How has doing what you should” resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?
- Timothy Ferriss
Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: Wouldn’t you like to have that? Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?
- Dale Carnegie
When you simplify… When you get down to the essence, you fix so many things.
- Jack Dorsey
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
- Bill Gates
Plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.
- Peter Drucker
Ask yourself, what’s the one thing that I can do right now so I’m on track to achieve my someday goals?
- Gary Keller
The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.
- Seth Godin
Marketing knits the whole organization together.
- Phil Knight
Motivation gets you going and habit gets you there.
- Zig Ziglar
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.
- Benjamin Franklin
People ask me what’s the most important function when you’re starting an organization or setting up the kind of culture and values that are going to endure. The discipline I believe so strongly in is H.R., and its the last discipline that gets funded.
- Howard Schultz
Nothing will work unless you do.
- Maya Angelou
Chinese people today have strong demand for culture, but we need effective supply, and China needs innovative cultural products.
- Wang Jianlin
