If you can survive 'Saturday Night Live,' then you're good as far as show business is concerned.
My father was funnier than me. My father was Richard Pryor-funny. I'm just a better businessman.
Fifteen years ago, if you said business will help save the environment people would have laughed at you. Today, I believe that is a serious proposition.
Small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy.
I'd never assume an audience was anything but totally receptive and perfect. Seriously, it seems to me that's the only circumstance you can work under. Otherwise, speaking for myself, you may as well be in the advertising business.
Entrepreneurs don't really make mistakes, though. We just make decisions that seem right at the time, but which sometimes turn out to have been the wrong path to take. For example, we allowed a buyer to place a huge opening order and later had to take some product back. We didn't have our sell-through programs in place, so in hindsight, it would have been wiser to sell in less product at the outset. The scary thing is you are always making decisions without knowing the future.
If you are at all successful in your business, be prepared to never have another good day or bad day at work. There will be so many things - good and bad - happening on any given day that you will be on a roller coaster of highs and lows. If that excites you, then go for it.
The acceleration of the marketing process, the concentrating of manufacturing, greater diversification, increased international competition, have in turn speeded up product improvements, product innovations and new product introductions. The stakes are high, the failures costly.
The 10 or 12 artists I have known really well all my life are at least as competitive as professional athletes. They may express it in slightly different terms, but you look at the Jackson Pollocks et al., and they are as interested in wall space in the galleries as Joe Montana is in the percentage of completed passes. So the notion that symphonic conducting, or stage play, or pure art, is not a competitive business is real bullshit.
In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.
Steve Jobs is perhaps the most competitive human being I have ever met in my life, and yet I would argue one of the most artistic human beings I have ever met in my life. You can trash the movies all you want, but they do have an artistic component. And yet brutal competition knows no peers when it comes to Hollywood.
Who, precisely, are your Dreamers? Are their Dreams in Technicolor? Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public?
My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs.
Who comes first? Don't be silly, says King Hal; it's employees. That is - and this dear Watson, is elementary - if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.
Treat the customer as an appreciating asset.
Only business can build a low-carbon economy. Business is all about seeing ideas and growing them. Businesses have the resources, the people, the technical skills to make things happen - and they have the channels to market
Progressive companies regard climate change as an opportunity rather than a threat
With a lot of kids in the business, the parents get as twisted as they do, and there's a lot of opportunities to go their own way, but anyone has that opportunity.
It's a great discipline to have to report to somebody, even if you're the sole owner
The manifesto of the dealmaker is simple: Reality is negotiable.
The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
It will be only a matter of time before the music business establishment completely folds.
When we control business in the public interest we are also bound to encourage it in the public interest or it will be a bad thing for everybody and worst of all for those on whose behalf the control is nominally exercised.
It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form... they shall do so under absolutely truthful representations... Great corporations exist only because they were created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.
The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth.
