One of the greatest failures to execute is the lack of follow-up. This seems so obvious, yet very few companies place as much emphasis on accountability as they do on figuring what they want to get done. Steve Reinemund, who was president of Pizza Hut when I was head of marketing there, is the best I’ve ever seen on this front. He always carried a three-by-five note card in his shirt pocket. When saw something that needed to be done, he’d pull out the card and write it down. Like everyone else who witnessed this, I quickly realized that I had better write down the same things because he’d surely be on me until they got done. Steve got results everywhere he went, whether it was as president of Pizzas Hut or Frito-Lay or chairman of PepsiCo, because he made a point of following up. People often lose track of what they’ve talked about in meetings of what they promised to do, but when you write it down, you won’t forget it.
- David Novak
Notable Quotables
Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.
- George Soros
An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting
- Thomas Jefferson
If my mother hadn’t been the most patient person in the world, I might never have gone to school.
- Ben Horowitz
We made a disastrous move into casual shoes.
- Phil Knight
We are each responsible for our own life – no other person is or even can be.
- Oprah Winfrey
In any new business, someone has to have a vision. You are as good as the people around you. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Identify your core community and go from there. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. In my experience it often takes as long as five years to make a business work. Partners can fail you. Staff may not execute properly. You could be too far ahead of the market. SO you have to be willing to hand in there and make it happen. From the founding of Phat Farm in 1992 until 1997, I lost money. By my account, I experienced $10 million in losses. But today Phat Farm is visible, it is imitated and it generates hundreds of millions of dollars. It took time, but good ideas often do need time to take off. Being an entrepreneur requires instinct, fortitude and the ability to accept that the world does not run on your schedule. Sometimes you just have to believe.
- Russell Simmons
I love the presentation from the more flamboyant guy, who excitedly presents his plans.
- Jack Welch
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
- Andrew Carnegie
Out that expending emotional labor, working without a map, and driving in the dark involve confronting fear and living with the pain of vulnerability. The artist comes to a détente with these emotions and, instead of fighting with them, dances with them. The linchpin connects as a result of the indispensable nature of her contribution. The artist, on the other hand, connects because that’s what art is. The artist touches part of what it means to be truly human and does that work again and again.
- Seth Godin
War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war:
- Peter Thiel
I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he’s got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.
- Bill Gates
That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
- Steve Jobs
For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.
- Peter Thiel
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been
- Sam Walton
Whatever I engage in, I must push inordinately.
- Andrew Carnegie
Hong Kong still offers the best value.
- Lee Shau Kee
Remember, when you were made a leader you weren’t given a crown, you were given a responsibility to bring out the best in others. For that, your people need to trust you. And they will, as long as you demonstrate candor, give credit, and stay real.
- Jack Welch
On scores of occassions, when I have faced emergencies, some of them so grave that my life was in jeopardy, I have been miraculously guided past these difficulties through the influence of my Invisible Counselors. My original purpose in conducting Council meetings with imaginary beings, was soley that of impressing my own subconscious mind, through the principle of auto-suggestion, with certain characteristcs which I desired to acquire. In more recent years, my experimentation has taken on a different trend. I now go to my imaginary counselors with every difficult problem which confronts me and my clients. The results are often astonishing, although I do not depend entirerely on this form of counsel.
- Napoleon Hill
You need to live every day like it could be your last.
- Joel Olsteen
When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
- Bill Gates
Its never too late…to start heading in the right direction.
- Seth Godin
The market is fast-moving, fast-growing. Things that are true today may not be true tomorrow.
- Robin Li
All of us, in a sense, struggle continuously all the time, because we never get what we want. The important thing which I’ve really learned is how do you not give up, because you never succeed in the first attempt.
- Mukesh Ambani
We will make our products work out of the box.
- Steve Ballmer
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
- Winston Churchill
Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.
- Dale Carnegie
I am not trying to say that I am poor and that I don’t like beautiful things. But I don’t like luxury for luxury sake or in the sense of showing off luxury.
- Vladimir Potanin
Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.
- Thomas Edison
I ask every participant to think about who their personal business mentors have been and why. I tell them my own business hero was Andy Pearson and I give them a few Andy stories to illustrate why. Then we break into groups of about twenty to go around in a circle and have each person talk about the person who has mean the most to him…We reconvene in the larger group and discuss some of the traits that were exhibited by the mentors; integrity, passion, inspiration, a positive outlook, and so on. A lot of people said it was someone who, helped me realize what I could achieve or really cared about me as a person. Then I try to get them to go a little deeper. I say, Now suppose that you were a fly on the wall, looking down on this room ten years from now. What would you like people to be saying about you? How would you feel if someone were saying that you were the person who had the greatest impact on his or her professional life?
- David Novak
Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that’s something I’m accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn’t bother me.
- Timothy Ferriss
No matter what you do, your job is to tell your story.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks. And that proved true nine times out of ten. It was one way we were able to grow so fast.
- Sam Walton
Unrelenting confidence was necessary.
- Ben Horowitz
God will lead you from where you are right now to where He wants to you to be, if you’ll let Him.
- George Foreman
Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.
- Bill Gates
Perhaps your challenge isn’t finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.
- Seth Godin
One of More of the Six Basic Fears.
- Napoleon Hill
Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.
- Bill Gates
I went online with winelibrary.com in July of 1997. That was my first professional online play
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.
- Ray Dalio
Success (a win) doesn’t make you, and failure (a loss) doesn’t make you.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.
- Bill Gates
I wanted to be an artist. They see the world in a very different way.
- Jack Dorsey
I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same – they give the exact same advice. It’s like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.
- Ben Horowitz
One thing I’ve always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they’ll tell you, ‘We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.
- Bill Gates
Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.
- Bill Gates
The thing for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I will see that you get it.
- Dale Carnegie
What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!
- Larry Page
Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.
- Henry Ford
What kind of business world are we living in?
- Jack Ma
Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade – and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.
- George Soros
Why do you ask so much?
- Lee Shau Kee
Market the change; be bold. Remember don’t be a bad ad, be a good one.
- David Novak
Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
- Jeff Bezos
The London property market has excellent investment opportunities.
- Wang Jianlin
There will be no government that will be against business, so you can go ahead and invest.
- Aliko Dangote
Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker – whom I had hired to manage the store from TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could alone. We pledges houses and property, everything we had.. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.
- Sam Walton
I’m concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it’s the worst day of your life.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
- Jack Welch
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
- Henry Ford
Urm. Put a shield on my saber I must.
- Yoda
Developing a customer who loves the business so much that they become an unpaid and passionate marketer for the company.
- Clay Clark
I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.
- Timothy Ferriss
The squeaky wheel always getting the grease.
- James Taylor
Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.
- Bill Gates
I believe in that Old Chinese Proverb, When the student is willing, the teacher appears. But I would add, It also doesn’t hurt to be a little proactive about it.
- David Novak
Time can be an ally or an enemy. What it becomes depends entirely upon you, your goals, and your determination to use every available minute.
- Zig Ziglar
When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.
- Mark Zuckerberg
I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.
- Elon Musk
If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
- Dale Carnegie
I guess the worst moment I ever had in business was the fear that Southwest Airlines wouldn’t get off the ground.
- Herb Kelleher
I think when I was young, let’s call it high school, and even before that, I just loved comedy, and I loved comedians. I grew up watching Laurel and Hardy. That’s really a long time ago. I loved Jerry Lewis. I just loved comedians.
- Steve Martin
It’s almost always harder to raise capital than you thought it would be, and it always takes longer. So plan for that.
- Richard Harroch
The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that’s expensive and has high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land, or taking advantage of byproducts that aren’t used in the food chain today, or by intercropping.
- Bill Gates
Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.
- Bill Gates
Great companies are built on great products.
- Elon Musk
The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.
- George Soros
Our minds were freewheeling. We rushed to get things done.
- Sam Walton
I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.
- Elon Musk
If you don’t have ambition, you should not be alive.
- Aliko Dangote
Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what the other person wanted and how he could get it.
- Dale Carnegie
We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.
- Elon Musk
And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.
- John D. Rockefeller
A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it’s extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let’s make it’s easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.
- Jack Dorsey
We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’
- Warren Buffett
Put all excuses aside and remember this: YOU are capable.
- Zig Ziglar
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.
- Ben Horowitz
Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster’s then-teenage founders, credibly threatened to disrupt the powerful music recording industry in 1999. The next year, they made the cover of Time magazine. A year and a half after that, they ended up in bankruptcy court.
- Peter Thiel
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
- Richard Branson
By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.
- Bill Gates
This is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.
- Jeff Bezos
For the employee, the goal is to have full access to necessary information and as much independent decision-making ability as possible. For the entrepreneur, the goal is to grant as much information and independent decision-making ability to employees or contractors as possible.
- Timothy Ferriss
Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.
- Steve Ballmer
Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.
- Yoda
The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
- Peter Thiel
Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
- Dale Carnegie
The reason I was able to grow my business was that every day, after producing 30 minutes of wine television, I spent 15 hours a day replying to every single person’s e-mail and every single person’s Twitter @ reply.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
- Ben Horowitz
It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
- Timothy Ferriss
