Motivational Quotes

Business

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

- Sydney Biddle Barrows

Best Quotes about Business

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

To succeed in business it is necessary to make others see things as you see them.

Patterson, John H.

There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.

Jacobs, Randall

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

Little, Royal

It's the economy, stupid.

Clinton, Bill

I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.

Ford, Henry

There's a lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of.

Walton, Sam

Nobody ever lost money taking a profit.

Baruch, Bernard M.

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.

Watson, Thomas J.

10.

Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

Allen, Fred A.

11.

Don't steal; thou it never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

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

Proverb

13.

Business is a combination of war and sport.

Maurois, Andre

14.

Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.

Baudrillard, Jean

15.

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

O'Reilly, Anthony J. F.

16.

People want economy and they'll pay almost any price to get it.

Iacocca, Lee

17.

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

18.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

Henderson, Bruce

19.

I buy when other people are selling.

Getty, J. Paul

20.

Drive thy business or it will drive thee.

Benjamin Franklin

21.

A vacation should be just long enough that you're boss misses you, and not long enough for him to discover how well he can get along without you.

22.

You can't run a business or anything else on a theory.

Geneen, Harold S.

23.

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic!

Bernbach, William

24.

Designing your product for monetization first, and people second will probably leave you with neither.

Tara Hunt

25.

Drive your business, let not your business drive you.

Franklin, Benjamin

26.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

27.

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

Welch, John

28.

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

Cooley, Mason

29.

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

30.

When you are skinning your customers you should leave some skin on to grow again so that you can skin them again.

Khrushchev, Nikita

31.

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

Warren Buffett

32.

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

33.

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

Beene, Geoffrey

34.

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.

35.

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.

Lippmann, Walter

36.

A consumer is a shopper who is sore about something.

Coffin, Harold

37.

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

Oscar Wilde

38.

Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

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

Dane, Frank

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Cardenas, Ruben

43.

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

Ford, Henry

44.

Good design can't fix broken business models.

Jeffrey Veen

45.

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

46.

The first thing the secretary types is the boss.

47.

A hard thing about business is minding your own

48.

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

Plautus, Titus Maccius

49.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

50.