American Businessman Quotes

I don't think there's anything else I'd rather be doing than making Sun successful.

Show me a chief executive who's on five boards and who lends his or her name, prestige and time to 15 community activities - and I'll show you a company that's underperforming. A chief executive is paid to run the company. That's the CEO's job.

Albert J. Dunlap

In our land of opportunities and distractions, it's hard to devote our attention to the quiet pleasures of reading. It's as if we live our lives in a noisy restaurant and can't have the intimate conversation we most yearn for.

The first time I watched television I felt exactly as if something important had taken an elevator ride up to my head and gotten off and turned on the light in my mind. I knew that I was going to do something in television. It was in my cards. I remember feeling the warm relief of knowing where my future was.

Mary Wells Lawrence

The death of Walt Disney is a loss to all the people of the world. In everything he did Walt had an intuitive way of reaching out and touching the hearts and minds of young and old alike. His entertainment was an international language. For more than forty years people have looked to Walt Disney for the finest in family entertainment.

Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

To be a success in advertising you must want to fill other people with a passion for possession.

Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Chemical engineering more than any other, may be called the engineering of the future. It is the result of an evolution in which most of the other branches have played a part... The chemical engineer stands today on the threshold of a vast virgin realm; in it lie the secrets of life and prosperity for mankind in the future of the world.

John Hays Hammond

In the search for character and commitment, we must rid ourselves of our inherited, even cherished biases and prejudices. Character, ability and intelligence are not concentrated in one sex over the other, nor in persons with certain accents or in certain races or in persons holding degrees from some universities over others. When we indulge ourselves in such irrational prejudices, we damage ourselves most of all and ultimately assure ourselves of failure in competition with those more open and less biased.

J. Irwin Miller

If you're not called crazy when you launch something new, it means you're not thinking BIG enough.

Linda Rottenberg

The only way to consistently stay ahead of the game is to adopt a long-term view and, if appropriate, with a strong contrarian spin.

We're working to overcome the overly macho nature of the current online console game world, where a handful of the high testosterone crowd fight for supremacy, while the mass of casual game players stay away.

Reggie Fils-Aimé

For over a half century now I've watched office obesity develop into a full-blown, crippling disease. As our office clutter mounts, we're ever more intimidated and frustrated by it. We engineer drainage and removal of water and liquid wastes from society to prevent hazardous buildup, but the effluent that pours into our offices-paper-is never flushed out.

Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

Peter Diamandis

The purpose of this book is to show how economic analysis can be used in formulating business policies. It is therefore a departure from the main stream of economic writings on the theory of the firm, much of which is too simple in its assumptions and too complicated in its logical development to be managerially useful. The big gap between the problems of logic that intrigue economic theorists and the problems of policy that plague practical management needs to be bridged in order to give executives access to the practical contributions that economic thinking can make to top-management policies.

One can only wonder when the advocates of progressive economics will realize that, despite their best efforts, you cannot regulate your way to economic prosperity.

Maybe the Lord's word is decisive on that: The poor are always with us. You know, you'll never run out of people, you can help.

If you have to have a policy manual, publish the 'Ten Commandments.'

Robert Townsend (author)

We are not to judge thrift solely by the test of saving or spending. If one spends what he should prudently save, that certainly is to be deplored. But if one saves what he should prudently spend, that is not necessarily to be commended. A wise balance between the two is the desired end.

We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.

Show me a person who never made a mistake, and I will show you a person who never did anything.

William Rosenberg

All programs in the future will be written in a way that there is no single point of failure. There's no one server that can die and take down the service.

Perhaps the worst software technology of all time was the use of physical lines of code [for metrics]. Continued use of this approach, in the author's opinion, should be considered professional malpractice.

My advice to the unborn is, don't be born with a gambling instinct unless you have a good sense of probabilities.

Flexibility - In all aspects of life, the person with the most varied responses 'wins'.