Quotes by Business Executives

My company has had a safety program for 150 years. The program was instituted as a result of a French law requiring an explosives manufacturer to live on the premises with his family.
Crawford Greenwalt
Bigness comes from doing many small things well. ... Individually they are not very dramatic transactions. Together though they add up.
Edward S. Finkelstein
There is no data on the future.
Laurel Cutler
If you're not happy every morning when you get up leave for work or start to work at home if you're not enthusiastic about doing that you're not going to be successful.
Donald M. Kendall
Success is that old ABC-Ability Breaks and Courage.
Charles Luckman
Success is that old ABC- ability breaks and courage.
Charles Luckman
Show me a man with both feet on the ground and I'll show you a man who can't put his pants on.
Arthur K. Watson
Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.
Colleen C. Barrett
The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything.
Lee Iacocca
One realizes the full importance of time only when there is little of it left. Every man's greatest capital asset is his unexpired years of productive life.
Paul W. Litchfield
Show me a man with both feet on the ground and I'll show you a man who can't put his pants on.
Arthur K. Watson
Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.
Colleen C. Barrett
The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything.
Lee Iacocca
One realizes the full importance of time only when there is little of it left. Every man's greatest capital asset is his unexpired years of productive life.
Paul W. Litchfield
Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find time. The quickest way to receive love is to give the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.
Brian Dyson
Progress results only from the fact that there are some men and women who refuse to believe that what they know to be right cannot be done.
Russell W. Davenport
If I were to suggest a general rule for happiness I would say "Work a little harder Work a little longer Work!"
Frederick H. Ecker
So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties it may be too late.
Lee Iacocca
When it comes to getting things done we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.
Colleen C. Barrett
It is not easy but you have to be willing to make mistakes. And the earlier you make those mistakes the better.
Jane Cahill Pfeiffer
If you're not happy every morning when you get up leave for work or start to work at home-if you're not enthusiastic about doing that you're not going to be successful.
Donald M. Kendall
Today's public education system is a failed monopoly: bureaucratic rigid and in unsteady control of dissatisfied captive markets.
David T. Kearns
If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties it may be too late.
Lee Iacocca
There comes a time when you've got to say "Let's get off our asses and go ..." I have always found that if I move with 75 percent or more of the facts I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.
Lee Iacocca
In the three years I played ball we won six lost seventeen and tied two. Some statistician ... calculated that we won 75 percent of the games we didn't lose.
Roger M. Blough
There is no data on the future.
Laurel Cutler
Today changes must come fast and we must adjust our mental habits so that we can accept comfortably the idea of stopping one thing and beginning another overnight.... We must assume that there is probably a better way to do almost everything. We must stop assuming that a thing which has never been done before probably cannot be done at all.
Donald M. Nelson
Management is now where the medical profession was when it decided that working in a drug store was not sufficient training to become a doctor.
Lawrence Appley
The Bell System is like a damn big dragon. You kick it in the tail and two years later it feels it in its head.
Frederick Kappel
I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them.
Harold Geneen
Every man who has lived his life to the full should by the time his senior years are reached have established a reserve inventory of unfinished thinking.
Clarence Randall
It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011
Russell Grandinetti
If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.
Jim Barksdale
Unfortunately, in many cases, the rule book goes way too far - it tries to tell people how to be instead of explaining what we're trying to do.. We need recipes, not rules.
Howard Behar
Dishonesty is like a boomerang. Just when you think all is well, it hits you in the back of your head.
Pavan Choudary
In this ever-changing society, the most powerful and enduring brands are built from the heart. They are real and sustainable. Their foundations are stronger because they are built with the strength of the human spirit, not an ad campaign. The companies that are lasting are those that are authentic.
Howard Schultz
Mass advertising can help build brands, but authenticity is what makes them last. If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.
Howard Schultz
Authentic brands don't emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does...
Howard Schultz
Don't wait until people are dead to give them flowers.
Sean Covey
The role of the CEO is to enable people to excel, help them discover their own wisdom, engage themselves entirely in their work, and accept responsibility for making change. (164)
Vineet Nayar
Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful.
Andrew S. Grove
Business success contains the seeds of its destruction.
Andrew S. Grove
The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your buisness.
Andrew S. Grove
Don't differentiate without a difference.
Andrew S. Grove
The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
Eric Schmidt
If you take risks, you may fail. But if you do not take risks, you will surely fail. The greatest risk of all is to do nothing.
Roberto Goizueta
This compound should be available from most good drugstores. I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently............In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace." the author dexcribing life in Hungary in the 1950s under Communist Russian rule.
Andrew S. Grove
Instead of playing to win, I was playing not to lose. It reminds me of the story I once heard about two friends being chased by a bear, when one turned to the other and said, "I just realized that I don't need to outrun the bear; I only need to outrun you.
Sean Covey
Isn't it kind of silly to think that tearing someone else down builds you up?
Sean Covey
Far better than a precise plan is a clear sense of direction and compelling beliefs. And that lies within you. The question is, how do you evoke it?
Dee Hock
You can buy a man's time, you can buy a man's physical presence at a certain place, you can even buy a measured number of skilled muscular motions per hour or day. But you cannot buy enthusiasm, you cannot buy initiative, you cannot buy loyalty; you cannot buy the devotion of hearts, minds, and souls. You have to earn these things.
Clarence Francis
Repeat business or behavior can be bribed. Loyalty has to be earned.
Janet Robinson
You hire the best people you can possibly find. Then it's up to you to create an environment where great people decide to stay and invest their time.
Rich Lesser
If you want to find your greatest love, it will be inside the hardest thing you do.That's where it will be
Regina Dugan
Years later, that image of my father -slumped on the family couch, his leg in a cast, unable to work or earn money, and ground down by the world-is still burned into my mind.Looking back now, I have a lot of respect for my dad.He never finished high school, but he was an honest man who worked hard.
Howard Schultz
Excellence doesn't mean we have to be 100% better in any one thing: it means we strive to be 1% better in 100 things.
Jan Carlzon
To stay vigorous, a company needs to provide a stimulating and challenging environment for all these types: the dreamer, the entrepreneur, the professional manager, and the leader. If it doesn't, it risks becoming yet another mediocre corporation.
Howard Schultz
We are on a mission to win the hearts and minds of our employees.
Vern Dosch
Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears
Robert Sarnoff
Priorities need to change at different stages of our life if we want to grow and evolve.
Apurva Purohit