Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You have to pretend you're 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.
Most Americans probably aren't aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed.
When a change in how some element of one's business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off.
The new environment dictates two rules: first, everything happens faster; second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else, somewhere.
Accept that no matter where you go to work, you are not an employee you are a business with one employee, you. Nobody owes you a career. You own it, as a sole proprietor.
Pickups, S.U.V.'s, vans and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon. Converting those should be our first priority.
Congress will pass a law restricting public comment on the Internet to individuals who have spent a minimum of one hour actually accomplishing a specific task while on line.
There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.
I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.
A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.
I'm a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet.
If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry
If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry.
It's not enough to make time for your children. There are certain stages in their lives when you have to give them the time when they want it. You can't run your family like a company. It doesn't work.
You need just the right amount of ambition . . . If you have too little ambition, you don't push or work hard. If you have too much ambition, you put yourself ahead of others, elbow them out of your way.
I really don't have much respect for the people who live their lives motivated by an exit strategy existing, being performed. There was no option that we were trained in that says, 'If it gets too hard, get up and leave.'
Most companies don't die because they are wrong; they die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.
You need to plan the way a fire department plans: it cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.
The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves.
I believe in the value of paranoia. Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.
Think about it. Right now, a whole generation of young (customers) in the United States has been brought up to take computers for granted. Pointing a mouse is no more mysterious to them than hitting the "on" button on the television is to their parents.
The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example.
E-Commerce is happening the way all the hype said it would. Internet deployment is happening. Broadband is happening. Everything we ever said about the Internet is happening. And it is very, very early. We can't even glimpse it's potential in changing the way people work and live.
The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand. It doesn't magically allow you to build businesses by turning investors' money into operating expenses indefinitely. The money always runs out eventually.. the Internet doesn't change that, as we have seen.
A question that often comes up at times of strategic transformation is, should you pursue a highly focused approach, betting everything on one strategic goal, or should you hedge? ... Mark Twain hit it on the head when he said, Put all of your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET.
In the first round of work simplification...you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction...To implement the actual simplification, you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical ordains it.
Long distances used to be a moat that both insulated and isolated people from workers on the other side of the world. But every day, technology narrows that moat inch by inch. Every person in the world is on the verge of becoming both a coworker and a competitor to every one of us ... Technological change is going to reach out and sooner or later change something fundamental in your business world.
There's a tendency at the senior and middle-manager level to be too big-picturish and too superficial. There is a phrase, "The devil is in the details." One can formulate brilliant global strategies whose executability is zero. It's only through familiarity with details - the capability of the individuals who have to execute, the marketplace, the timing - that a good strategy emerges. I like to work from details to big pictures.
I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of ten or twenty million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it.