Quotes by Business Executives - Page 2

For more than three decades, coffee has captured my imagination because it is a beverage about individuals as well as community. A Rwandan farmer. Eighty roast masters at six Starbucks plants on two continents. Thousands of baristas in 54 countries. Like a symphony, coffee's power rests in the hands of a few individuals who orchestrate its appeal. So much can go wrong during the journey from soil to cup that when everything goes right, it is nothing short of brilliant! After all, coffee doesn't lie. It can't. Every sip is proof of the artistry -- technical as well as human -- that went into its creation.
Howard Schultz
If you could understand impermanence deeply, you would develop more equanimity. You would not get too excited about either the ups and downs of life.
Satya Nadella
Textbooks are not so much wrong as they are conventional – and an entrepreneurial idea must be contrarian.
Jim Manzi
The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.
Norbet Platt
Leadership is not about your ambition. It is about bringing out the ambitions of your team.
Cheryl A. Bachelder
We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluable problems.
Lee Iacocca
Don’t let your principles sit idle on a plaque. Bring them to life.
Cheryl A. Bachelder
The role of leaders is not to get other people to follow them but to empower others to lead.
Bill George
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.
Lee Iacocca
The primary purpose of going to college isn't to get a great job. The primary purpose of college is to build a strong mind, which leads to greater self-awareness, capability, fulfillment, and service opportunities, which, incidentally, should lead to a better job.
Sean Covey
This is not his job, I thought, it's his passion.
Howard Schultz
One of the greatest responsibilities of an organization’s leadership is to communicate with unwavering clarity the values on which the organization has been built.
Vern Dosch
Early on I realized that I had to hire people smarter and ore qualified than I was in a number of different fields, and I had to let go of a lot of decision-making. I can't tell you how hard that is. But if you've imprinted your values on the people around you, you can dare to trust them to make the right moves.
Howard Schultz
Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technology officer, was asked by The Huffington Post, "What's the most important lesson you've learned from a mistake you've made in the past?""I said no to a lot of opportunities when I was just starting out because I thought, 'That's not what my degree is in' or 'I don't know about that domain.' In retrospect, at a certain point it's your ability to learn quickly and contribute quickly that matters. One of the things I tell people these days is that there is no perfect fit when you're looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.
Padmasree Warrior
All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.
Robert S. McNamara
We are free to choose our paths, but we can't choose the consequences that come with them.
Sean Covey
If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.
Sean Covey
It's a long road. Setbacks don't actually matter.
Sundar Pichai
It is what we think we know that keeps us from learning.
Chester I. Barnard
You can't do a good deal with a bad guy. The dishonesty tax is too high and is not something you will factor into your side of the equation.
Chet Billingsley
Honesty is always the best policy, even when it's not the trend.
Sean Covey
If you can't tell someone how to think, then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think.
Eric Schmidt
In a servant leadership culture we learn by choice or example that if we want to be great, we have to serve others respectfully.
Vern Dosch
My tears brought no sense of release or relief. Their flight felt like the lightest, coldest touch of a departing lover.
Anne Giardini
Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.
Dee Hock
Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who "do not usually know what's supposed to be impossible.
Eric Schmidt
Failure is good as long as it doesn’t become a habit.
Michael Eisner
Our confidence needs to come from within, not without. From the quality of our hearts, not the quantity of things we own. After all, he who dies with the most toys...still dies.
Sean Covey
In an environment where there is a shared vision of excellence, where people can be the best they can be on a daily basis, where they know what is expected of them, understand that reward is linked to performance, and believe they can make a difference because they will be heard, they will make a difference. They will go beyond our expectations and great things will happen.
Frederick Smith
If you want to sustain excellence over a long time, you'd better come up with a system that works well. Anyone can sprint for a little while, but you can't sprint for forty years.
Michael Dell
I started the business with a simple question: How can we make the process of buying a computer better? The answer was: Sell computers directly to the end customer. Eliminate the reseller's markup and pass those savings on to the customer.
Michael Dell
Sometimes it's better not to ask-or to listen-when tell you something can't be done. I didn't ask for permission or approval. I just went ahead and did it.
Michael Dell
There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn't true. If yoy want to change people's behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the arguments. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule.
Eric Schmidt
Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.
Rusty solomon
[Performance with purpose is] basically PepsiCo saying that companies can no longer perform and toss costs to society. We believe that the new future is public-private partnerships, where companies feel responsible for society at large.
Indra Nooyi
I used to believe that culture was “soft,” and had little bearing on our bottom line. What I believe today is that our culture has everything to do with our bottom line, now and into the future.
Vern Dosch
We can never fall short when it comes to recruiting, hiring, maintaining and growing our workforce. It is the employees who make our organization’s success a reality.
Vern Dosch
Nothing tells you more about an organization than the way it makes decisions.
Dennis Bakke
The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of a mistake
Meg Whitman
My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, then you've had a great life.
Lee Iacocca
We are only constrained by the boundaries of our imagination
David Moffett
The daring leader helps the people see a future state, greater than their own imagination, and worthy of pursuit.
Cheryl A. Bachelder
Life is not about control. It’s not about getting. It’s not about having. It’s not about knowing. It’s not even about being. Life is eternal, perpetual becoming, or it is nothing. Becoming is not a thing to be known, commanded, or controlled. It is a magnificent, mysterious odyssey to be experienced.
Dee Hock
The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.
Bob Iger
The most important thing is to be excellent, interesting, authentic, or useful. To be the thing, not the thing that sells the thing. That's fantastic news for creative people, who specialize in the stuff. Thanks to toomuchness, creativity, once exclusively the province of poets, has suddenly become a business imperative.
Andrew Essex
It's all about how you feel, not how you look
Sean Covey
Being infinite, the whole of reality is too much for the conscious human mind to grasp. The best any one of us can do is to take the biggest slice of Infinite Reality we can hold - intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally - and make that slice our personal sense of what is real. But no matter how broad it is, any human perception of reality can be no more than a tiny sliver of Infinite Reality.Civilization also has a limited perception of Infinite Reality. And with a haughty self-assurance, it imposes that perception on us until we think it is our own.
Gordon MacKenzie
The leader must have both – the courage to take the people to a daring destination and the humility to selflessly serve others on the journey.
Cheryl A. Bachelder
There are moments in our lives when we summon the courage to make choices that go against reason, against common sense and the wise counsel of people we trust.
Howard Schultz
Community is composed of that which we don't attempt to measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Most are things we cannot measure no matter how hard we try.
Dee Hock
Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.
Robert W. Sarnoff
Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.
Howard Schultz
Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. Yesterday's widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.
Eric Schmidt
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Walter H. Cottingham
Making heroes out of celebrity CEOs is at the heart of the crisis in corporate leadership.
Bill George
I wrote Beyond The Label to open up the aperture through which we look at the world. I want us to reconsider what it means to be a woman, a mentor, a wife, a mother.
Maureen Chiquet
Good leaders are always in the “act” of leading. They listen as much to others as they listen to themselves.
Maureen Chiquet
Allowing yourself to follow the crevices of your heart lines is a messy process and not easy to characterize or rationalize into neat and tidy lists and boxes.
Maureen Chiquet
This book is for those of you who are tired of trying to squeeze into constrained categories, who long for a life without limits on who you are or who you will become.
Maureen Chiquet
The underlying issue in getting women to top positions is what kind of leadership we value and how we teach, assess, and promote “good” leaders in all organizations.
Maureen Chiquet