Motivational Quotes

Business

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.

- David M. Ogilvy

Best Quotes about Business

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out -- either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.

Ogilvy, David

In our factory, we make lipstick. In our advertising, we sell hope.

Revson, Charles

A hard thing about business is minding your own

A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not of those of spaciousness, and cannot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show.

Herzen, Alexander

You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.

Carnegie, Dale

It's better to take over and build upon an existing business than to start a new one.

Geneen, Harold S.

A man's success in business today turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want.

Lee, Gerald Stanley

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you must win their hearts to have them work with you.

Riorio

Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.

Chandler, Raymond

10.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

Blanchard, Ken

11.

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Warhol, Andy

12.

The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.

Gilbey, Walter

13.

Corporation. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Bierce, Ambrose

14.

If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that -- but that isn't simple.

Lundborg, Louis B.

15.

More business is lost every year through neglect than through any other cause.

Cathcart, Jim

16.

It doesn't matter to me if a man is from Harvard or Sing Sing. We hire the man, not his history.

Ford, Henry

17.

If you can run one business well, you can run any business well.

Branson, Richard

18.

The happiest time in a man's life is when he is in the red hot pursuit of a dollar with a reasonable prospect of overtaking it.

Billings, Josh

19.

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

Oscar Wilde

20.

You make the best products you can, and you grow as fast as you deserve to.

Olsen, Kenneth

21.

I think it is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises -- but only performance is reality.

Geneen, Harold S.

22.

Drive your business, let not your business drive you.

Franklin, Benjamin

23.

If a fellow wants to be a nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mail man to somebody on his behalf.

Kettering, Charles F.

24.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

Welch, John

25.

I'm not a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never think about money. Beautiful things make money.

Beene, Geoffrey

26.

The poor man who enters into a partnership with one who is rich makes a risky venture.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

27.

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

Blake, William

28.

The business that considers itself immune to the necessity for advertising sooner or later finds itself immune to business.

Brown, Derby

29.

There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting.

David Letterman

30.

Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

Grove, Andrew

31.

Our planning system was dynamite when we first put it in. The thinking was fresh; the form mattered little. It was idea oriented. We then hired a head of planning, and he hired two vice presidents, and then he hired a planner; and the books got thicker, and the printing more sophisticated, and the covers got harder, and the drawings got better.

Welch, John

32.

It is not the employer who pays wages -- he only handles the money. It is the product who pays the wages.

Ford, Henry

33.

Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market.

Little, Royal

34.

Markets change, tastes change, so the companies and the individuals who choose to compete in those markets must change.

Wang, An

35.

The chief business of the American people is business.

Calvin Coolidge

36.

As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth.

Hawken, Paul

37.

It is almost as difficult to keep a first class person in a fourth class job, as it is to keep a fourth class person in a first class job.

Dunn, Paul H.

38.

We are all manufacturers. Making good, making trouble, or making excuses.

Adolt, H. V.

39.

If you don't do it with excellence, don't do it at all! Because if it's not excellent, it won't be profitable or fun, and if you're not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?

Townsend, Robert

40.

The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife.

Ogilvy, David

41.

You can hype a questionable product for a little while, but you'll never build an enduring business.

Kiam, Victor

42.

Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.

Dickens, Charles

43.

Business has only two functions -- marketing and innovation.