To create a big company, you need more partners, as it is hard to handle such a project alone. Such projects bring access to the expertise and management resources of the partners, and their connections above all.
- Vladimir Potanin
Notable Quotables
Great CEOs build exceptional strategies for gathering the required information continuously. They embed their quest for intelligence into all of their daily actions from staff meetings to customer meetings to one-on-ones. Winning strategies are built on comprehensive knowledge gathered in every interaction the CEO has with an employee, a customer, a partner, or an investor.
- Ben Horowitz
Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.
- P.T. Barnum
It’s true that I run a multi-national group but I have no interests in India. So please tell me, what should my identity be?
- Lakshmi Mittal
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
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Albert Einstein
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
Why is this mediocre? We love to point out how broken our systems are. We enjoy getting angry at hotels or government agencies or airlines that are so obviously doing a poor job. Idiots! But we almost never look at merely mediocre products and wonder why they aren’t great. Mediocre services or products do what they’re supposed to, but have set the bar so low that it’s hardly worth the energy to cross the street to buy them. A resolute generic sameness pervades this mediocrity. Why isn’t every restaurant meal a fabulous buy for the money? Why isn’t every tax dollar spent with the intensity and focus it could be spent with? It seems as though we are willing to accept mediocre as long as the product, the service, or the organization isn’t totally broken.
- Seth Godin
I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.
- Elon Musk
My God, these guys don’t even know what the return-on-investment will be on this thing.
- James C. Collins
I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses.
- Sam Walton
Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! … How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care … We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end … Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.
- Winston Churchill
They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.
- Thomas Edison
I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
- Reid Hoffman
Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you, you will be neither successful nor happy.
- Napoleon Hill
I was not naturally talented. I didn’t sing, dance or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive.
- Steve Martin
If your temper is aroused and you tell ’em a thing or two, you will have a fine time unloading your feelings. But what about the other fellow? Will he share your pleasure? Will your belligerent tones, your hostile attitude, make it easy for him to agree with you? If you come at me with your fists doubled, said Wood row Wilson, I think I can promise you that mine will double as fast as yours; but if you come to me and say, ‘Let us sit down and take counsel together, and, if we differ from one another, understand why it is that we differ from one another, just what the points at issue are,’ we will presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the points on which we differ are few and the points on which we agree are many, and that if we only have the patience and the candor and the desire to get together, we will get together.
- Dale Carnegie
I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
- Timothy Ferriss
I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.
- Sam Walton
Sure, ideas that spread, win, but ideas that don’t get spoken always fail.
- Seth Godin
[On Twitter] We believe that fundamentally we are building a utility.
- Jack Dorsey
We’ll continue to expand our footprint… Oracle’s Fusion cloud applications for HCM, CRM and ERP all have a new simplified user interface and an integrated social network that makes our enterprise applications as easy-to-use and familiar as Facebook, while enabling better collaboration and teamwork among your employees and your customers.
- Larry Ellison
Less than 3% of newly published authors make enough in royalties and advances to be happy to live on.
- Seth Godin
So many people label themselves a failure when they fail at something. Instead, the entrepreneurial spirit is realizing that these failures are a necessary part of the path to wherever you’re going to end up.
- Tony Hsieh
Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.
- Seth Godin
For me, the most fun is change or growth. There are definitely elements of both that I like. Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn boat.
- Tony Hsieh
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean, if a few drops of ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.
- Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles
Before you can be sure of your ability to transmute DESIRE into its equivalent, you will require SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE of the service, merchandise or profession which you intend to offer in return for fortune.
- Napoleon Hill
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
You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.
- Timothy Ferriss
In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
- Harry Truman
To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
- Elbert Hubbard
People naturally follow those stronger than themselves.
- John Maxwell
The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
- Peter Thiel
One clear-cut result is worth a dozen wise precautions.
- Winston Churchill
Rule No.1: Never lose money.Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
- Warren Buffett
The challenge of the retail business is the human condition.
- Howard Schultz
For good or for ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.
- Winston Churchill
No one can make you jealous, angry, vengeful, or greedy — unless you let him.
- Napoleon Hill
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.
- Thomas Edison
A company only has so much money. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest… Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.
- Jack Welch
When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America – a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go other than home or work. We also created an industry that did not exist: specialty coffee.
- Howard Schultz
Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn’t do with anything else, we just have to do it.
- Mark Zuckerberg
You can’t build any kind of organization if you’re not going to surround yourself with people who have experience and skill base beyond your own.
- Howard Schultz
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.
- Sergey Brin
Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants, comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.
- Winston Churchill
What if there were no longer only two sides? Not just capital versus labor, but a third team, one that straddled elements of both? I think there’s a huge opportunity for a third kind of participant, a linchpin, and now there is an opportunity to change all the rules that we’ve lived with all our lives. There is a shortage of this third kind of worker, and that shortage means that the market needs you desperately. The con game is ending, at least for people passionate enough to do something about it.
- Seth Godin
Once we finished Christmas Rappin’ we began shopping it around town. There was interest, but no one was biting. The industry’s attitude was that Rapper’s Delight despite its U.S. sales and international appeal was an unrepeatable fluke. We identified Polygram which had a great roster of funk and R&B acts (Kool and the Gang, the Gap Band, Parliament) as the best place for Kurtis, so we made up a gang of test pressings and took them to clubs all over the city. Response in the street from DJs and club goers was great. So to hype up PolyGram we placed fake orders for the record into their system by telling retailers and wholesalers to order the 12 inch through PolyGram. PolyGram didn’t own it yet, but we created an appetite for Christmas Rappin that led them to buy it…So in the fall of 1979 Kurtis Blow signed with Mercury Records a division of Polygram Records, making him the first rapper on a major label…Christmas eve 1979 was the first time that I heard Christmas Rappin’ on the radio; I was upstairs at my family’s house. Frankie Crocker the biggest radio DJ in New York played it on WBLS.
- Russell Simmons
I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.
- Larry Page
Use money to make money.
- Lee Shau Kee
I hate politics. What they say and what they do is completely different.
- Tadashi Yanai
Ask yourself a question: Is my attitude worth catching?
- Zig Ziglar
Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
- Albert Einstein
The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them. Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams. So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them. Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury.
- Dale Carnegie
If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook. And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone. If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault. That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. ‘I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.’ What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.
- Seth Godin
Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.
- John C. Maxwell
The most expensive piece of real estate is the six inches between your right and left ear. It’s what you create in that area that determines your wealth. We are only really limited by our mind.
- Dr. Dolf de Roos
So what we do every Monday is review the whole business…I put out an agenda – 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.
- Steve Jobs
We also now believe that this slowdown in capital spending could extend beyond two quarters.
- John Chambers
Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.
- Howard Schultz
Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.
- Dale Carnegie
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
If he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.
- Peter Thiel
If you believe in quality, you can’t just tell everybody We believe in quality! You’ve got to pay bonuses based on quality. You’ve got to let everyone in the organization know that they are being judged on quality.
- Jack Welch
I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
- Mark Zuckerberg
A movement is thrilling. It’s the work of many people, all connected, all seeking something better.
- Seth Godin
Some libertarians say, ‘Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.’ But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn’t earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.
- Ben Horowitz
I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.
- Rupert Murdoch
Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?
- Michael Bloomberg
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
- Warren Buffett
To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.
- Winston Churchill
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
You always have to give something when you get something.
- Jack Nadel
By combining broadband Internet, phone and video services over a single cable line, we are taking a major step towards implementing future integrated data, voice and video telecommunications on a mass market scale.
- John Chambers
Every one of my positions cuts – out half the country. I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay rights, I’m pro-immigration, I’m against guns, I believe in Darwin.
- Michael Bloomberg
The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.
- Seth Godin
I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.
- Bill Gates
A man has no right to occupy another man’s time unnecessarily.
- John D. Rockefeller
We were always trying to look for people who could help us beyond what we were doing.
- Phil Knight
Giving should be entered into in just the same way as investing. Giving is investing.
- John D. Rockefeller
The employees who share innovative ideas may also be the folks who have some hidden talents that would help incorporate their suggestions.
- Harvey Mackay
Here’s a statistician joke for your next hot date: Person A: What happens when Bill Gates walks into a bar of 55 people? Person B: I don’t know. What? Person A: The average net worth jumps to more than a billion dollars!
- Timothy Ferriss
I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.
- Walt Disney
A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.
- Reid Hoffman
Doing a mall is not only construction of the physical place, what’s important is the merchandising mix.
- Henry Sy
Athletic skills are acquired over a long period of time and after countless hours of practice.
- Zig Ziglar
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
- Bill Gates
What is the 20% of my belongings that I use 80% of the time? Eliminate the other 80% in clothing, magazines, books, and all else. Be ruthless – you can always repurchase things you can’t live without.
- Timothy Ferriss
If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I’ll tell you what you are.
- Dale Carnegie
Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.
- Zig Ziglar
Like technical debt, management debt comes in too many different forms to elaborate entirely, but a few salient examples will help explain the concept. Here are three of the more popular types among startups: 1. Putting two in the box 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process
- Ben Horowitz
Even freebies must be delivered with a certain salesmanship or the receiver does not perceived the true value of the gift.
- Jerry Vass
I spend a lot of time reading.”-Bill Gates, Entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft
- Bill Gates
Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.
- Elon Musk
Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.
- Elon Musk
Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The London property market has excellent investment opportunities.
- Wang Jianlin
There is far more opportunity than there is ability.
- Thomas Edison
When I first joined the Irvine Company, I realized that less than 11,000 acres were designated as open space in the original master plan, and that just didn’t seem adequate to me. So, I began the lengthy process working with public and community organizations to add more open space.
- Donald Bren