Quotes by Subject: Business
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Business is a good game - lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money. | |||
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. | |||
If you ain't the lead dog, the view never changes. | |||
A decision will be made before it's too late or soon thereafter. | |||
Most business plans fail. Obviously, a success is not a realistic goal. But the people responsible for the most spectacular failures get promoted first because of their experience. | |||
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. | |||
Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings. | * | ||
Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. | |||
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. | |||
There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting. | |||
Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. | |||
Organization doesn't really accomplish anything. Plans don't accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don't much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds. | |||
The nature of life is to make a virtue of the inevitable. | * | ||
A business must fulfill the needs of the human spirit. These include survival, safety, play, celebration, love, belongingness, self-esteem and self-actualization. | * | ||
A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one. | |||
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. | |||
If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, tho it be in the woods. | |||
The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow. | |||
There has never been a better time to saddle the naked ambition of the entrepreneur. | * | ||
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. | * | ||
No one has ever bet enough on a winning horse. | * | ||
Never let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. | * | ||
It's no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money. (Citizen Kane, 1940) | |||
Crash programs fail because they are based on a theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month. | |||
Although your company is highly profitable, I wouldn't be much of a consultant if I didn't recommend changes. | |||
Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted. (All About Eve) | |||
If past history was all there was to the game, the richest pople would be librarians. | * | ||
Goodwill is the one and only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy. | |||
The trouble in corporate America is that too many people with too much power live in a box (their home), then travel the same road every day to another box (their office). | |||
I listen to everybody and take notes. Particulary salesmen. They get close to people. | |||
A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. | * | ||
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. | |||
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. | |||
A brand is the complex result of marketing and operating decisions leading to one single point: The promise made to the consumer. | |||
There are a lot of cooks on stage here, but there's a big meal to be served. (1/10/00) | |||
This is not just about big business. This is not just about money. This is about making a better world for people because now we have the technology and the instruments to do that. | |||
Most plans are just inaccurate predictions. | |||
It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. | |||
There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. | |||
Quality, quality, quality: never waver from it, even when you don't see how you can afford to keep it up. When you compromise, you become a commodity and then you die. | |||
If you want to make enemies, try to change something. | * | ||
Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannotget more time. | |||
A computer will not make a good manager out of a bad manager. It makes a good manager better faster and a bad manager worse faster. | |||
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. | |||
We must have strong minds, ready to accept facts as they are. | |||
Where there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. | * | ||
The early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese. | * | ||
Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesman. | |||
A true friend stabs you in the front. | |||
You walk very slowly and maybe by chance you'll bump into a genius and he'll make you rich. | * | ||
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid. | * | ||
The companies that survive are the companies that improve the thing customers are doing already. | * | ||
Nuclear war would really set back cable. | |||
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away. | |||
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from. | |||
If the fans don't wanna come out to the ballpark, no one can stop 'em. | * | ||
Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. | |||
Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential and significantly devoid of common sense. | |||
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it. | |||
42.7% of statistics are made up on the spot. | * | ||
When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. | * | ||
A wise man puts his eggs carefully in one basket and watches the basket. | |||
Integrity has no need of rules. | |||
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary. | |||
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak. | * | ||
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. | * | ||
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form. | * | ||
Doing a thing well is often a waste of time. | |||
I'd put money on the sun and solar energy. I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. I wish I had more years left. (1931) | |||
Say I'm a banker and I create $30 million. I should get a part of that. And if you're a banker who destroyed $30 billion? | * | ||
It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked. | * | ||
If you stop working at a career, it goes away. When things are good, that's when you have to work harder, because otherwise it will disappear. And if you don't work toward it, you're not really appreciating what you've got. | |||
The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope. | |||
Raising your prices to make up for a shortage in customers and/or an increase in expenses is never wise. You want to raise your prices? You better increase your value. | |||
*indicates a past Quote of The Week
