Accept business only at a price permitting thoroughness. Then do a thorough job, regardless of cost to us.
Arthur C. NielsenRead
Be influenced by nothing but your clients' interests. Tell them the truth.
Interpretation
Focus on serving your clients' needs and be honest with them.
This quote emphasizes the importance of prioritizing clients' interests above all else and maintaining transparency and honesty in those interactions. Arthur C. Nielsen advocates for a client-centered approach in business, suggesting that success and trust are built by putting the needs of customers first and communicating with integrity.
In practice
In a business seminar, you could use this quote to emphasize ethical practices.
Accept business only at a price permitting thoroughness. Then do a thorough job, regardless of cost to us.
Participant (Productions) is the only production company in town that has a double bottom line: social good plus financial returns. It's too early to tell how our returns are going to look - though all signs are promising - but social good is what we're really after.
Poor firms ignore their competitors; average firms copy their competitors; winning firms lead their competitors.
Time is the friend of the wonderful business. It's the enemy of the lousy business. If you're in a lousy business for a long time, you're going to get a lousy result, even if you buy it cheap. If you're in a wonderful business for a long time, even if you pay a little too much going in, you're going to get a wonderful result if you stay in a long time.
Our model is to develop each business separately with its own shareholder and management - this way we can concentrate on the job in hand, rather than be part of some enormous and faceless conglomerate.
Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.
You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy.
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