The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
- Bill Gates
Notable Quotables
Lack of a well-defined purpose in life.
- Napoleon Hill
Economic recovery in the United States has been taking place at a slow pace at a time of uncertainty in the Middle East. However, Mainland China was able to show steady sustained growth. Hong Kong, being right at the southern gateway of Mainland China, is able to benefit from its growth.
- Lee Shau Kee
Being productive gives people a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that loafing never can.
- Zig Ziglar
We all know far too many stories where the third generation just destroys everything that the first two have built up, and I certainly hope my family are different because I’ve worked too hard and my father has worked too hard for it to be given away.
- Gina Rinehart
Management is nothing more than motivating other people.
- Lee Iacocca
If you are going through hell, keep going.
- Winston Churchill
Facing reality sounds simple, but it isn’t. I found it hard to get people to see a situation for what it is and not for what it was, or what they hoped it would be.
- Jack Welch
We can never own property (because of property taxes) we can just control it (by renting it from the government by paying taxes).
- Robert Kiyosaki
If you are unduly nervous, turn it around make your vulnerability an asset.
- Michael Levine
The biggest cowards are managers who don’t let people know where they stand.
- Jack Welch
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
- Ben Horowitz
Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.
- Peter Thiel
Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it’s digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules – not just for governments but for private companies.
- Bill Gates
Refuse to accept partial completeness.
- Timothy Ferriss
The cost of praising someone is nil – but every psychological study shows the payoff is huge.
- Harvey Mackay
Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human.
- Seth Godin
Churchill kept perspective on the crowds that gathered to hear him speak by conceding they would be twice as big if gathered to see him hanged.
- Winston Churchill
What I know for sure is that what you give comes back to you.
- Oprah Winfrey
Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and “do well by doing good.” Usually they end up doing neither.
- Peter Thiel
Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
- Reed Hastings
If you believe, as I do, that your employees truly are your most valuable asset, you will do whatever you can to help them do their jobs as well as possible.
- Harvey Mackay
They said it was only a ground shark, but I was not wholly reassured. It is as bad to be eaten by a ground shark as by any other.
- Winston Churchill
A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast. Good news travels slow.
- Ben Horowitz
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to gain mighty triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither gain much nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt
The austerity policies for the mainland property market will remain intact in 2011.
- Lee Shau Kee
If you don’t change the direction you are going, then you’re likely to end up where you’re heading…
- John C. Maxwell
Just as ships are built to sail the seas and planes to fly the heavens, so is man created for a purpose.
- Zig Ziglar
Most comedies are really hard to write, or to watch, because you kind of generally know what’s coming.
- Steve Martin
Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.
- Reed Hastings
In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it.
- Seth Godin
In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it’s disruptive and it’s a problem.
- Ray Dalio
People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold.
- Peter Thiel
It is going to be a little, if you will, laboratory for sustainability in businesses of small scale
- Larry Ellison
When I’m bored or tired of being blonde, I’ll throw on a wig. It’s a lot less of a permanent way to change your look, and I have about 10 – all different colors, shapes, bobs, long hair, short, feathered.
- Sara Blakely
The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.
- Bill Gates
Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.
- John C. Maxwell
I think what we’re lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.
- Howard Schultz
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
What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”
- James C. Collins
Failing forward” is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.
- John C. Maxwell
I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.
- Howard Schultz
In order for the United States to do the right things for the long term, it appears to be helpful for us to have the prospect of humiliation. Sputnik helped us fund good science – really good science: the semiconductor came out of it.
- Bill Gates
Everybody understands the market in this area is consolidating.
- John Chambers
My favorite writers are all Jews – David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark – well, you get the picture.
- Zig Ziglar
When it comes to Starbucks, I take every threat very personally.
- Howard Schultz
I like to play cards. I’m not very good, because I don’t want to calculate, I just play by instinct. But I’ve learned a lot of business philosophy by playing poker.
- Jack Ma
Southwest Airlines have been such a people-first model for me for so long that it was inspiring just to be physically in a place I already knew so much about. Yet I didn’t fully understand just how far they are willing to go to get the right people in the right seats until well after our best practices tour when someone I know applied for an entry level position with the company.
- David Novak
If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.
- Elon Musk
DAY TWENTY I DECLARE that I am calm and peaceful. I will not let people or circumstances upset me. I will rise above every difficulty, knowing that God has given me the power to remain calm. I choose to live my life happy, bloom where I am planted, and let God fight my battles. This is my declaration.
- Joel Olsteen
About two-thirds of us work between forty-five and fifty-five hours per week.
- Thomas J Stanley
Most of us (97 percent) are homeowners. We live in homes currently valued at an average of $320,000. About half of us have occupied the same home for more than twenty years. Thus, we have enjoyed significant increases in the value of our homes.
- Thomas J Stanley
Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.
- Henry Ford
I remember thinking quite logically that I didn’t want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.
- Bill Gates
There is always plenty of capital for those who can create practical plans for using it.
- Napoleon Hill
He spoke with more eloquence than wisdom.
- Winston Churchill
I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.
- Winston Churchill
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
- Bill Gates
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
While the uncertainties that the economic climate holds are a challenge for all companies, we are confident that by drawing from the strengths of our people, as well as on our core values of quality, initiative, trust and creativity, we will maintain our focus and strategic direction.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I’ve always been interested in science – one of my favourite books is James Watson’s ‘Molecular Biology of the Gene.
- Bill Gates
There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
- Dale Carnegie
The team with the best players wins.
- Jack Welch
Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.
- Og Mandino
With the attention I got on my wealth, I thought I would have become a source of resentment, but it is just the other way around – it just generates that much more ambition in many people.
- Azim Premji
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
- Winston Churchill
So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.
- Peter Drucker
Even if we laid off 100 percent of the employees, the infrastructure costs would still kill us without a sharper sales ramp.
- Ben Horowitz
Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.
- Ben Horowitz
Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.
- Peter Drucker
Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.
- Larry Ellison
Know what your brand stands for an exaggerate it in everything you do.
- David Novak
I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.
- Sam Walton
The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability… When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.
- Howard Schultz
I think Twitter is best when it sparks conversations elsewhere. To use YouTube and Facebook and all the tools we have available to us today to respond and also promote and answer and engage is awesome.
- Jack Dorsey
You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.
- Steve Martin
I try to keep a positive intention and use whatever resources I have to benefit others. I try to create businesses that I think are not hurtful. I try to do things that I think are helpful to the environment, to the animals, and to the planet.
- Russell Simmons
Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves.
- Zig Ziglar
The good-will of a business which is losing money is not worth much.
- Ron Chernow
If a man’s heart is rankling with discord and ill feeling toward you, you can’t win him to your way of thinking with all the logic in Christendom. Scolding parents and domineering bosses and husbands and nagging wives ought to realize that people don’t want to change their minds. They can’t be forced or driven to agree with you or me. But they may possibly be led to, if we are gentle and friendly, ever so gentle and ever so friendly.
- Dale Carnegie
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
- Elon Musk
If you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers to these questions, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit – aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probably scenarios?4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?5. What are you putting off out of fear?6. What is it costing you – financially, emotionally, and physically – to postpone action?7. What are you waiting for?
- Timothy Ferriss
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
Just because you don’t announce your plan doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
- Herb Kelleher
The ultimate connection is when you are connected to the creator of the universe.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do.(…) You can say that and be 100 percent sincere, because if you were the other person you, of course, would feel just as he does (…) Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind (…) Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was – and where he was. For it is those things -and only those things – that made him what he was. (…) You deserve very little credit for being what you are – and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.
- Dale Carnegie
When your hobbies get in the way of your work – that’s OK, but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves… well.
- Steve Martin
There’s a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.
- Reed Hastings
The most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.
- Ben Horowitz
Before you take on the media, you have to know something about The Pitch.
- Michael Levine
My organization, my colleagues and I, are paid to run hotels in good times and fair times. We’re professionals. That’s what we do. I don’t give a damn about the short-term market implications.
- Stephen Wynn
Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.
- Winston Churchill
the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability,” said John D., than for any other under the sun.
- Dale Carnegie
You need to take pride in what God has given you.
- Joel Olsteen
As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.
- John C. Maxwell
There is little success where there is little laughter.
- Andrew Carnegie
I told [John Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb’, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.
- Thomas Edison
When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything, and at the very end, you push a button and say, ‘Convert this to Android format.’
- Larry Ellison
Money isn’t everything… but it ranks right up there with oxygen.
- Zig Ziglar
