Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I spend 90% of my time with people who don't report to me, which also allows for serendipity, since I'm walking around the office all the time. You don't have to schedule serendipity. It just happens.
If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.
... thething I am proudest of in my whole business life is that I do not take, that I never took in all my life, and never, never! will take, one single penny more than 6% on any loan or any contract.
Decisions are a way of defining ourselves. There comes a time in life when there is nothing else to do but go your own way. Where you are headed there are no trails, no paths, just your own instincts.
We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
Most true artists care about music as a pure, passionate art form, but can get caught in the trap of the business. Which, sadly, has now become more important than the artist or even the music itself.
Everyone wants to call wrestling 'the business.' Why don't you treat it like a business? I don't care if you're running a diner, if you're running a car wash or a wrestling company. It's all business.
Commercial concerns have expanded from family business to corporate wealth which is self-perpetuating and which enlightened statesmen and economists now dread as the most potent oligarchy yet produced.
A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action.
The Net as a whole is not that reliable, so our blips in service don't cause major problems. However, we are certainly working on improving our own reliability as well as those sites that we depend on.
There's another way we are getting behind business - by sorting out the banks. Taxpayers bailed you out. Now it's time for you to repay the favour and start lending to Britain's small businesses again.
Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.
Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's "supposed" to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.
I don't care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don't harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there you're never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants
There is a huge business case for diversity. You will be making products for people you don't understand, you don't interact with. If you don't have an inclusive, diverse workforce, it makes you myopic.
I have, thanks to my travels, added to my stock all the superstitions of other countries. I know them all now, and in any critical moment of my life, they all rise up in armed legions for or against me.
Leaders are people who can discern the inevitable and act accordingly. When people talk about business acumen, discernment is a big part of it. It's a bit like gut instinct, but a little more developed.
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don't design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don't really care, as long as we're selling the one the customer wants.
Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.
Artists don't like the business side. None of us were born understanding money. We all had to learn how to do it. So it's just something creative people need to get familiar with... not really so scary.
We can no longer pretend that business is immune from the rising tide of environmental or social challenges or that companies can create value in isolation from the communities of which they are a part.
If we change the way the electricity sector operates, we can bring down our levels of carbon pollution, and continue the crucial task of tackling climate change. Putting a price on carbon would do this.
If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed.
Our model is to develop each business separately with its own shareholder and management - this way we can concentrate on the job in hand, rather than be part of some enormous and faceless conglomerate.
Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did.
The rigor and discipline we use in running our business is key to consistently executing our growth strategy. And we systematically applied the same discipline to our investments, including acquisitions.
Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope.
Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere.
The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
If you ask the wrong question, of course, you get the wrong answer. We find in design it's much more important and difficult to ask the right question. Once you do that, the right answer becomes obvious.
The 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 of ends.
We decided that it was imperative for us to use our resources to create a new paradigm: one in which business operates to add value to society - without compromising the well-being of future generations.
My father had his own business, a clothing store, which he inherited from his father. He travelled abroad frequently and was quite extravagant, so we had skiing holidays and summer holidays on the beach.
In business as in life, sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But over time, if you play long enough, everybody gets what he deserves - good and bad.
If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something.
I couldn't sell water in a desert. I have no business acumen. I can tell you why you have no business acumen, and I can tell you why your project may or may not work, but I have no ability to make money.
The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.
When all is said and done, what must be remembered is a newspaper is a business. It used to be a fabulous business that made extraordinary margins. It's now a very good business with appropriate margins.
If we die, do not mourn for us. This is a risky business we're in, and we accept those risks. The space program is too valuable to this country to be halted for too long if a disaster should ever happen.
When I had challenges, it taught me to be more on top of it for the future. Things go wrong all the time when you're running your own business, but it's how you perceive it and deal with it that matters.
"Spirituality" in business sounds lofty. How practical is it? The answer is "very." There's a fundamental way in which Spirit and consciousness contribute to worldly success-and it has long been ignored.
Now, occultism is not like mystic faculty, and it very seldom works in harmony either with business aptitude in the things of ordinary life or with a knowledge of the canons of evidence in its own sphere.
What I’ve learned is that if you really want to be successful at something, you’ll find that you put the time in. You won’t just ask somebody if it’s a good idea, you’ll go figure out if it’s a good idea.
Sometimes during the two-year curriculum, every MBA student ought to hear it clearly stated that numbers, techniques, and analysis are all side matters. What is central to business is the joy of creating.
Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog's foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.
I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.
Thirty years ago, about 80% of a company's assets resided in its plant and equipment, with 20% in the knowledge of its people. Today, the reverse is true. The knowledge of our staff is our principal asset
Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.