Quotes on Business

Tracking account planning is rather like counting a mixed batch of tropical fish. You think you see patterns, but they've all changed by the time you've finished counting.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.

Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately, it takes a lifetime to master.

I just figured out that if I gave my all into this game - if I put everything into the fight business - then I would eventually run the fight business.

Excellence is not an act, but a habit.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.

Goals must never be from your ego, but problems that cry for a solution.

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.

I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me.

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others' negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

I think that the larger and more complex the business gets, I have to listen twice as much as I speak.

When I was trying to popularize the concept of the Internet - ten or 15 years ago - I came up with this concept of "the 5 Cs." Services needed to have content, context, community, commerce, and connectivity. After that, when I was trying to think of what the key management principles were to build into the culture, I started talking about the Ps. The P's were things like passion, perseverance, perspective and people. I think the people aspect is really the most important one.

Never play a thing the same way twice.