Notable Quotables

I came from a Hindi medium school… the principal felt that I would not fit into an English medium college. Though I was top in my class in school, and I got admission in other colleges, but I really wanted to study in St. Xavier’s.

- Lakshmi Mittal

We’ll see how that evolves. Obviously, it doesn’t mean we’ll just be willing to do anything that’s requested of us.

- Sergey Brin

I think that diversity is key for the next American entrepreneurs. They want to be a part of this society where there is so much diversity they have to have people from all the experiences.

- Russell Simmons

It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?

- Peter Thiel

We knew that Lyft was going to raise a ton of money. And we are going [to their investors], Just so you know, we’re going to be fund-raising after this, so before you decide whether you want to invest in them, just make sure you know that we are going to be fund-raising immediately after.

- Travis Kalanick

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

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

- Winston Churchill

California, in a sense, is almost Starbucks’ largest country, with almost 3,000 stores

- Howard Schultz

Be candid with everyone. Candor is the biggest dirty little secret in business?

- Jack Welch

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

- Steve Martin

Making it good at scale means admitting that it must be different and embracing the changes that you’ll need to make to keep things from falling apart.

- Ben Horowitz

If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply ‘go with the flow’ and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for. That’s been my secret. Stop wishing and start doing.

- Timothy Ferriss

There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

- Peter Drucker

New customers are silver…loyal customers are gold.

- Anonymous

[Medco] had a different culture with respect to spending money. I believe health care demands that we be as frugal as possible and pay money for things that matter. We’re pretty frugal. Everybody has the same size offices. Everybody has the same size cube. There are no perks.

- George Paz

You’ve got to listen to what God’s telling you and not to what other people may tell you. People will try to talk you out of the dream in your heart.

- Joel Olsteen

Planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out.

- Peter Thiel

I feel that people I trusted – I don’t know who, on what level – have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay. And I think, frankly, that I’m the best person to see it through.

- Rupert Murdoch

Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.

- Dale Carnegie

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’re asking somebody who has a wife and is really happily married, ‘So, what’s your next wife going to be like?’ And I’m like, ‘What?

- Travis Kalanick

I do not believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process

- Oprah Winfrey

The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.

- Jack Ma

I wish to God that Apple and Google were partners in the future.

- Steve Wozniak

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

- Walt Disney

Strange as it sounds, great leaders gain authority by giving it away.

- Napoleon Hill

I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things. I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

- Elon Musk

We have built a company with a business mix and operating system that will allow us to deliver record results in any foreseeable economic climate, … We have just completed a very successful management transition and I’ve never been more confident about the company’s future.

- Jack Welch

I think George Will is somebody that said recently that the Republicans will not lose, as a Republican, that the Republicans will not win the election. I think it was a terrible statement.

- Donald Trump

Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

- Timothy Ferriss

You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.

- Jack Welch

If I had to do it over again, I would have done the same but earlier. It is never too early to start something. The sooner you begin, the sooner you get your experience.

- Warren Buffett

Group projects are the exception in school, but they should be the norm.

- Seth Godin

Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up and moving forward is a choice.

- Zig Ziglar

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

- Bill Gates

If you had to boil down the Wal-Mart system to one single idea, it would porbably be communication, because it is one of the real keys to our success…Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

- Sam Walton

“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. 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

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.

- Oscar Wilde

There is always room for those who can be relied upon to delivery the goods when they say they will.

- Napoleon Hill

Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.

- Peter Thiel

You don’t have to start from scratch to do something interesting. You don’t have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world. You have to have a good idea. You have to convince other people of those good ideas. And you have to push as quickly as possible.

- Jack Dorsey

A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.

- Peter Drucker

The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,

- Peter Thiel

Most people have ‘one way’ brains—they acquire information and do nothing. Guerillas have ‘two way’ brains—they obtain relevant information and act on it.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

- Bill Gates

It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don’t feel like an oligarch.

- Vladimir Potanin

The missing ingredient for nearly all of the 1,000-plus clients I have worked with directly to improve their businesses is pigheaded discipline and determination. We all get good ideas at seminars and from books, radio talk shows and business-building gurus. The problem is that most companies do not know how to identify and adapt the best ideas to their businesses. Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.

- Chet Holmes

To be a champion, you have to learn to handle stress and pressure. But if you’ve prepared mentally and physically, you don’t have to worry.

- Harvey Mackay

We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we’re going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water.

- Larry Ellison

We believe our growth rate indicates that Cisco continues to gain market share against our traditional competitors in most product sectors.

- John Chambers

I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

- Herbert Bayard Swope

If there is any one secret of success,’ said Henry Ford, ‘it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

- Dale Carnegie

I don’t know what causes a person to be ambitious, but it is a fact that I have been overblessed with drive and ambition from the time I hit the ground.

- Sam Walton

Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.

- Jim Collins

We provide food that customers love, day after day after day. People just want more of it.

- Ray Kroc

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

Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.

- Napoleon Hill

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

- Winston Churchill

There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

- Bill Gates

One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon – instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

- Dale Carnegie

Give your subconscious a chance to work by turning your brain off from time to time. Don’t focus on work or solving problems constantly.

- Harvey Mackay

In the end, Mockler and the board were proved right, stunningly so. If a shareflipper had accepted the 44 percent price premium offered by Ronald Perelman on October 31, 1986, and then invested the full amount in the general market for ten years, through the end of 1996, he would have come out three times worse off than a shareholder who had stayed with Mockler and Gillette.20 Indeed, the company, its customers, and the shareholders would have been ill served had Mockler capitulated to the raiders, pocketed his millions, and retired to a life of leisure.

- James C. Collins

We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere… can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

- Elon Musk

Whether it’s eight o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock at night, I always try to greet others before they have a chance to speak to me.

- Zig Ziglar

I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

- Elon Musk

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

- Winston Churchill

Money won’t make you have, but it will pay for the search.

- Prince

If you are going to be successful, you must develop persistence. How do you do that? It is not easily condensed in one simple statement, but one thing you can be sure of is that your must define your purpose.

- Zig Ziglar

Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.

- Bill Gates

It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.

- Timothy Ferriss

I may be over the top on this, but I just don’t want to like my competitors. I want my people to believe that whenever he and our other competitors succeed, we will be less able to do all the things we want to do.

- Phil Knight

Frankly speaking, I decided to become a businessman at the moment when I understood that it is possible, because I grew up in a country where it was not possible. There existed even a special article in the penal code of the Soviet Union which punished entrepreneurial activity.

- Vladimir Potanin

Businesses often forget the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliever good service from unhappy employees.

- Tony Hsieh

There is no sale without the story, no knockout without the setup.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Doughnuts are a normal part of a healthy, balanced diet.

- Brooke Smith

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

- Winston Churchill

That is what every successful person loves: the game. The chance for self-expression. The chance to prove his or her worth, to excel, to win. That is what makes foot-races, and hog-calling, and pie-eating contests. The desire to excel. The desire for a feeling of importance.

- Dale Carnegie

What I know for sure is that if you want success, you can’t make success your goal. The key is not to worry about being successful, but to instead work toward being significant, and the success will naturally follow.”

- Oprah Winfrey

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

- Ben Horowitz

Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world aren’t going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants,

- James L. Heskett

Differentiation (rating and evaluating people) Develops Great Organizations. Differentiation is hard, anybody who finds it easy doesn’t belong in the organization, and anyone who can’t do it falls in the same category…It is important for companies to continually remove the bottom 10 percent of their employees anually.

- Jack Welch

The thorough man of business knows that only by years of patient, unremitting attention to affairs can he earn his reward, which is the result, not of chance, but of well-devised means for the attainment to ends.

- Andrew Carnegie

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Cherish you visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blue prints of your ultimate achievements.

- Napoleon Hill

Too many people are living below their privileges. It’s because their vision has been clouded by past mistakes, disappointments, or how they were raised. They don’t feel like royalty. They don’t think they could be successful and really accomplish what God has put in their hearts. But I believe today, as I’m speaking faith into you, something is happening on the inside.

- Joel Olsteen

I want to help people to help themselves, which is much more valuable for both sides than just making a donation. By training the child of a farmer you compound the value of that dollar spent on training since that child will now help their parents. This is the multiplier effect. There’s no point in just feeding them or just giving them money.

- Lee Shau Kee

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