Motivational Quotes

Business

What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it.

- Dewolf, Nicholas

Best Quotes about Business

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent -- for every effect a perfect cause -- and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

Walton, Sam

You never really hear the truth from your subordinates until after 10 in the evening.

Jurgen Schrempp

The selfish spirit of commerce, which knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

Jefferson, Thomas

Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.

Morgan, John Pierpont

Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he's hired to do.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes that he has got the biggest piece.

Erhard, Ludwig

Location, location, location.

Dillard, William

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

Cooley, Mason

10.

Business conventions are important because they demonstrate how many people a company can operate without.

11.

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.

12.

Business has only two functions -- marketing and innovation.

Drucker, Peter F.

13.

The commercial class has always mistrusted verbal brilliancy and wit, deeming such qualities, perhaps with some justice, frivolous and unprofitable.

Nevill, Dorothy

14.

A consumer is a shopper who is sore about something.

Coffin, Harold

15.

Let love give way to business; give attention to business and you will be safe.

Ovid

16.

When two friends have a common bank account, one sings and the other weeps.

Proverb

17.

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards--and living up to them--is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.

Seth Godin

18.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

Thomas, Dylan

20.

Dewolf, Nicholas

21.

Don't worry about your physical shortcomings. I am no Greek god. Don't get too much sleep and don 't tell anybody your troubles. Appearances count: Get a sun lamp to keep you looking as though you have just come back from somewhere expensive: maintain an elegant address even if you have to live in the attic. Never nickel when short of cash. Borrow big, but always repay promptly.

Onassis, Aristotle

22.

You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart.

Watson, Thomas J.

23.

Goodwill is the one and only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy.

Field, Marshall

24.

If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.

Buffett, Warren

25.

It is surprising, in the welter of questions that one gets at (AGMs), how few actually relate to the performance of the company, or the decisions taken by the board in particular areas.

Harvey-Jones, John

26.

You generally hear that what a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him, but in business what a man doesn't know does hurt.

Lewis, E. St. Elmo

27.

To business that we love we rise betime, and go to't with delight.

Shakespeare, William

28.

Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.

Ritz, Cesar

29.

One of the vices of the virtue of decentralization is that people don't share ideas.

O'Reilly, Anthony J. F.

30.

Talk of nothing but business, and dispatch that business quickly.

Aldus Manutius

31.

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

32.

Business, that's easily defined; it's other people's money.

Dumas, Alexandre

33.

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

Ford, Henry

34.

The City's reluctance to take a stand on an issue like the British Gas pay row makes a mockery of corporate governance and shareholders' ability to influence annual general meetings.Institutions should be obliged to make public how they vote at such events.They should be obliged to provide customers with a record of how they vote on every kind of issue.

Donovan, Patrick

35.

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

Little, Royal

36.

I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity.

Sydney Biddle Barrows

37.

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

38.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

Mcnealy, Scott

39.

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

Riorio

40.

Business is like a wheelbarrow--it stands still until someone pushes it.

41.

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Leavitt, Theodore

42.

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

Kashoggi, Adnan

43.

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

Oscar Wilde

44.

Nobody ever lost money taking a profit.

Baruch, Bernard M.

45.

Far too many executives have become more concerned with the four P's -- pay, perks, power and prestige -- rather than making profits for shareholders.

Pickens, T. Boone

46.

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.

Ceo, Harold Geneen

47.

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

Plautus, Titus Maccius

48.

You can't run a business without taking risks.

Drexler, Millard

49.

You don't hear things that are bad about your company unless you ask. It is easy to hear good tidings, but you have to scratch to get the bad news.