Quotes about Business

You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission; don't even start asking for theirs.

He would also say: A boor cannot be sin-fearing, an ignoramus cannot be pious, a bashful one cannot learn, a short-tempered person cannot teach, nor does anyone who does much business grow wise. In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man

To me it seems pretty obvious that it would be simple to build a business around helping people achieve autonomy, a feeling of competence and relatedness. In fact, every web company that has been successful thusfar has their business build solidly on one or all of these. And I believe that as people discover that these things are within their reach, they will gravitate more and more towards companies that offer tools to helping them achieve happiness.

While in Asia, I heard a great expression, “Before You Can Multiply, You Must First Learn to Divide.”  I now find myself using this saying nearly every day.

The idea is that if you want to grow your business, you must learn to partner with others - and give them a slice.  This means you take a smaller slice of a bigger pie.

Yes, business really does change. 400 years ago, corporations were formed by royal decree. 300 years ago, many countries were powered by slave labour, or its closest moral equivalent. 200 years ago, debtors didn't go bankrupt, they went to prison. 100 years ago - well, business is largely the same as it was a century ago. And that's exactly the problem. Business hasn't changed, but today's array of tectonic global shocks demands a different, radically better kind of business. Yesterday's corporations visibly cannot meet today's economic challenges.

So, how to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it... pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action--that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

Making money isn’t the backbone of our guiding purpose; making money is the by-product of our guiding purpose. "If you’re doing something you love, you’re more likely to put your all into it, and that generally equates to making money.

Business social responsibility should not be coerced; it is a voluntary decision that the entrepreneurial leadership of every company must make on its own.

The invisible hand is crippled. What’s going on here? Wasn’t the invisible hand supposed to raise everyone into prosperity and well-being?

Yes – but it’s not. The world is getting phenomenally richer – but the costs of that wealth seem to be endemic poverty for vast swathes of the world’s population, the poisoning of the water we drink, the pollution of the air we breathe, and the fraying of the social and cultural fabric that binds us together.

We’re richer, but that wealth doesn’t reflect durable, authentic economic value – which is hitting fast diminishing returns. The growth that we’re pursuing is neither sustainable – nor is it, in many ways, real growth at all. Boardrooms from finance to autos to energy to pharma to fashion have learned that the hard way.

What if you gave away your intellectual property? What if you gave away your “tell me” content and used it as marketing material? What if your greatest assets were converted into “enable me” products? How would you need to re-invent YOUR business?

Let's face it: Most companies in most industries have a kind of tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is chasing, they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing. It’s the companies that see a different game that win big. The most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that the competition doesn't see?

Answering that question requires vuja dé. And vuja dé requires a radical shift in perspective—which is why outsiders often see the future first. It’s also one of the big limitations of benchmarking. The most creative CEOs I’ve met don’t aspire to learn from the “best in class” in their industry—especially when the best in class aren’t all that great. They aspire to learn from companies far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.

I think that today, more so than ever, corporate responsibility is the best strategic as well as financial path that most businesses can follow. For most businesses there are both compelling reasons to be responsible and compelling statistics that validate that responsible businesses do better according to traditional financial metrics. Of course, how you define "responsible" is somewhat of a conundrum.

My experience to date has been that change, particularly relative to business, rarely happens in a revolutionary way. That isn't to say there are not times when major change happens, but my experience is that particularly when you're encouraging businesses to change of their own volition, the change is more slow over time. I don't think global trade is going to go away. I think it's unlikely that global trade and multinationals are not going to be around.

If you take responsibility for yourself you will develop a hunger to accomplish your dreams.

Preserve the core, and let the rest flux. In their wonderful bestseller Built to Last, authors James Collins and Jerry Porras make a convincing argument that long-lived companies are able to thrive 50 years or more by retaining a very small heart of unchanging values, and then stimulating progress in everything else. At times "everything" includes changing the business the company operates in, migrating, say, from mining to insurance. Outside the core of values, nothing should be exempt from flux. Nothing.

Sacred Commerce reverses the common assumption that business and spirituality are mutually opposed, and instead looks at business as a path of destiny. The notion of capitalism infused with the sacred expands the notion of profit with the concept and the reality of the fourth bottom line: spirituality.

Many companies operate from more of a command-and-control environment — they decide what's going to happen at headquarters and have the organization execute. That doesn't work here because it's the community of users who really have control.

So we enable, not direct. We think of our customers as people, not wallets. And that has implications for how we run the company. We partner with our customers and let them take the company where they think it's best utilized.

The fact that used cars is our largest category is a good example. We would not have sat in a conference room and said, "Hey, how about used cars?" So what can be learned that is extensible to other companies is [to ask] what are your customers doing with your products that maybe you didn't anticipate that they would do? How do you think of your customers as your research and development lab, as opposed to having an R&D lab at headquarters?

The whole difficulty I think that that we're facing now is the question of who is going to ensure that corporations are accountable. The problem with leaving it to activists and non-governmental organizations—even with the tool of the Internet at their disposal—is that those organizations and those people don't have the legal right to compel corporations to disclose information, and that is something that governments can do. Governments can can send inspectors to companies. Governments can put legal requirements in place to disclose information that consumers and workers and other interested people need. Non-governmental organizations don't have that legal power and to me, that's what imposes substantial limitiations on how far we can go with trying to keep corporations accountable though non-governmental measures.

I think Google's founders are both a couple of guys with some high ideals which have been to some degree reflected in the way the company has been run in terms of its having a very good workplace and good employee programs, and now that they're going public they want in some ways to be able to ensure that that kind of approach continues. So they've effectively put in place this notion of "Don't Be Evil".

Now I think there are number of problems with that. The first one is: what is evil and who is going to be deciding what evil is? You can go a long way in terms of putting in various kinds of relatively normal employment practices without it being evil. Obviously if you're paying people slave wages and whatnot that would be evil, so that's the first question, but the second and I think the more profound question is: how is that idea of "Don't Be Evil" going to fit with the legally-compelled mandate of the directors and of the managers of that company to serve the best interest of the shareholders of that company? And that I think is where the problem lies. "Don't Be Evil" is a nice kind of phrase, kind of mission statement, kind of notion. But ultimately there's a legal duty and a legal obligation on the part of the company's directors and managers to do whatever needs to be done to ensure that the best interest of the shareholders are served, and that means the best financial interest of the shareholders.

Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith.

If you love your company and love what you do, you will serve your customers better—period!

The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.

Fail your way forward.  Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim.  Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating.  If you’re afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job.  Failure’s lessons are essential to success.

Embrace opportunities with limited downside, unlimited upside.  The best deals are those where your risk of loss is predictable and fixed if things go wrong, while your potential gains are enormous if things go right.  Take such deals whenever you can get them if the odds of success are halfway decent.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable.  If you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail.  If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail… and your business along with it.  If you can’t do what you love and make it profitable, you’ve either got a hobby or a headache, not a sustainable business.  Don’t settle for anything less than passion and profit.

Think for yourself.  Unplug yourself from follow-the-follower groupthink, and virtually ignore what everyone else in your industry is saying (except the ones everyone agrees is crazy).  Do your own research, draw your own conclusions, set your own course, and stick to your guns.  When you’re just starting out, people will tell you you’re wrong.  After you’ve blown past them, they’ll tell you you’re crazy.  A few years after that, they’ll (privately) ask you to mentor them.

...making profits is important because it keeps all our people in jobs and, you know, it keeps what we — what we’ve created going, but, you know, what we’re — what I get my — what I’m proud about doing is creating companies which we’re really proud of, you know, which we can really be proud of and a byproduct of that hopefully will be that they’ll be profitable and be able to pay the bills.