Motivational Quotes

Business

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

- Ogilvy, David

Best Quotes about Business

Business is not just doing deals; business is having great products, doing great engineering, and providing tremendous service to customers. Finally, business is a cobweb of human relationships.

Perot, H. Ross

Don't forget until too late that the business of life is not business, but living.

Forbes, B. C.

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

Show me the business man or institution not guided by sentiment and service; by the idea that he profits most who serves best and I will show you a man or an outfit that is dead or dying.

Harris, B. F.

Blessed is he who talks in circles, for he shall become a big wheel.

Dane, Frank

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

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

O'Reilly, Anthony J. F.

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.

Blair, Tony

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

Geneen, Harold S.

10.

It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by -- Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.

Mulford Jr., Ren

11.

'Whom are you?'he asked, for he had attended business college.

George Ade

12.

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

Watson, Thomas J.

13.

Women do not win formula one races, because they simply are not strong enough to resist the G-forces.In the boardroom, it is different.I believe women are better able to marshal their thoughts than men and because they are less egotistical they make fewer assumptions.

Foulston, Nicola

14.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

Warren Buffett

15.

Corporations cannot commit treason, or be outlawed or excommunicated, for they have no souls.

Coke, Sir Edward

16.

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

Plautus, Titus Maccius

17.

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

Little, Royal

18.

The novice in advertising frequently gives the public credit, for too much intelligence.

19.

Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.

Kiam, Victor

20.

Only as long as a company can produce a desired, worthwhile, and needed product or service, and can command the public, will it receive the public dollar and succeed

Carlson, Curtis

21.

The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.

Onassis, Aristotle

22.

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

23.

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

Leavitt, Theodore

24.

We have yet to see the full impact of the open, global marketplace. By 1997 all raw materials and technology will be available everywhere in the world. The only differences between countries and markets will be skill levels, education, and the level of empowerment of the workplace.

Pritchett, Lew

25.

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

Manzi, Jim

26.

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

Geneen, Harold S.

27.

Leisure for people of business, and business for people of leisure would cure many problems.

28.

Make every decision as if you owned the whole company.

Townsend, Robert

29.

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

Shakespeare, William

30.

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

Oscar Wilde

31.

So much for industry, my friends, and attention to one's own business; but to these we must add frugality if we would make our industry more certainly successful. A man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, keep his nose all his life to the grindstone, and die not worth a grout at last.

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

Every business is built on friendship.

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

33.

HereÆs my theory about meetings and life; the three things you canÆt fake are erections, competence and creativity. ThatÆs why meetings become toxic they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes. One of the most common creativity-faking tactics is when someone puts their hands in prayer position and conceals their mouth while they nod at you and say,'Mmmmmm. Interesting.'If pressed, theyÆll add,'IÆll have to get back to you on that.'Then they donÆt say anything else.

Douglas Coupland

34.

The question is, then, do we try to make things easy on ourselves or do we try to make things easy on our customers, whoever they may be?

Frand, Erwin

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Ford, Henry

38.

If you don't drive your business you will be driven out of business.

Forbes, B. C.

39.

The five steps in teaching an employee new skills are preparation, explanation, showing, observation and supervision.

Hook, Harold

40.

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

41.

It is much more difficult to measure non-performance than performance. Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Non-performance can almost always be explained away.

Geneen, Harold S.

42.

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

43.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Drucker, Peter F.

44.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

Henderson, Bruce

45.

You don't want to get the same kind of advice from everyone on your board.

Cardenas, Ruben

46.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

Luce, Henry

47.

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.

48.

Cut your losses and let your profits run.

Proverb, American

49.

Forty for you, sixty for me And equal partners we will be

Barzan, Gerald

50.

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.