Business Quotes - Page 53

The more successful enterprises are the more they try to replicate, duplicate, codify what makes us great. And suddenly they're inward thinking. They're thinking how can we continue to do what we've done in the past without understanding that what made them successful is to take risks, to change and to adapt and to be responsive. And so in a sense success breeds its own failure. And I think it's true of a lot of successful businesses.

The only thing certain about any negotiation is that it will lead to another negotiation .

The secret to success in business, and in life, is to serve others. Put others first in all you do.

If we change the way the electricity sector operates, we can bring down our levels of carbon pollution, and continue the crucial task of tackling climate change. Putting a price on carbon would do this.

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

You've got seconds to grab your audience's attention and only minutes to keep it.

Good business should contain something for both parties.

The mark of a successful organization isn't whether or not it has problems, its whether it has the same problems it had last year.

If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.

If you do a lot of things to build business, you'll build business. They don't have to be done perfectly to work, although the better you do them, the better they'll work. But the main point is that you have to do them - a lot.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can't tell you whether someone will fit into a company's culture.

With engineering, I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

The music business is motivated by money. Music is motivated by energy and feelings.

Pluck from under the family all the props which religion and morality have given it, strip it of the glamour, true or false, cast round it by romance, it will still remain a prosaic, indisputable fact, that the whole business of begetting, bearing and rearing children, is the most essential of all the nation's businesses.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

We need to get to kids who have no idea what we do. We need to open the doors wide and let them in. There are many undiscovered voices out there - voices that, against all odds, can rise up and enrich this culture and perhaps change the very nature of the marketplace for the better.

The executive art is nine-tenths inducing those who have authority to use it in taking pertinent action

I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. Some retail groups are introducing e-commerce and think that the bricks are no longer useful. But they will continue to be important.

Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it.

Let's be honest. There's not a business anywhere that is without problems. Business is complicated and imperfect. Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.