As a business owner, I understand the importance of prioritizing your bottom line, but it's equally as important to consider how you can succeed while also thinking about the long-term impact on the community.
Interpretation
Business success should balance profit with community impact.
This quote emphasizes that while achieving financial success is crucial for business owners, it is equally vital to consider the broader effects of their decisions on the community. A sustainable approach to business not only seeks profit but also prioritizes the welfare of the society it operates within, suggesting that long-term success is tied to community wellbeing.
In practice
This quote could be used in a presentation about corporate social responsibility.
We need to understand the other side to impact the other side. We become much more effective as humans and leaders when we engage in hearty conversations with those who are different from us, not necessarily to change our opinions, but to build the empathy muscle.
Civilized discourse demands critical thinking, self-reflexiveness, sober-headed analysis.
The ideal is to build a culture of healthy discussion, where everyone's ideas are valued. At KIND, we want everyone to be comfortable challenging my or anyone else's ideas without ever feeling or making someone else feel that the questioning is a personal attack.
You have to be very careful. If you over-commercialize a social mission, it completely loses its soul.
My dad had this incredible kindness that oozed through every part of his body. He had the ability to look at life positively in spite of what he went through. He was a Holocaust survivor. When he was 15-1/2 years old, he was liberated from the Dachau Concentration Camp by American soldiers who risked a lot to save people they had never met.
To maintain our entrepreneurial spirit, we have to create a culture in which everyone remembers that every order, big or small - and every interaction, every moment - will define what our company is today and what it will become tomorrow.
I want to leave something behind. A blueprint. A work ethic. Something that my great-grandkids and their kids and their kids can see: This is where it started. Lineage. Intergenerational wealth. Things that are here forever. All that.
Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters. This is the person who is most likely to achieve what is good and lasting.
I grew up in a working class family where there was no health insurance. I saw first hand the fracturing of the American dream and the bitterness that comes when there is no hope and a lot of despair. So I wanted to build the company, in a sense, that my father never got a chance to work for.
Never put your money against Cassius Clay, for you will never have a lucky day.
It's not how many hours you put in with a client or on a project. It's the quantity and quality of your energy - your focus and force - that determine whether that time is valuable.
You will always need more capital than you think, because it will always take you longer to reach profitability than you can imagine.
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