Businessman Quotes

The way to find what the mainstream will do tomorrow is to associate with the lunatic fringe today.

Jean-Louis Gassée

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.

Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.

What I saw generically on the pro-biotech side was the attitude that the technology was good and that it was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And there was a lot of money that had been invested in this, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. There was rhetoric like that even here in this department. You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view on some of the issues being raised. So I pretty much spouted the rhetoric that everybody else around here spouted; it was written into my speeches.

Corporations are going, we are told, to destroy the country. But what would this country be but for corporations? Who have developed it? Corporations. Who transact the most marvelous business the world has ever seen? Corporations.

A primary purpose for setting goals is to get you moving in the right direction. When you set goals, you have to keep them always in mind.

You must develop one all-important ability — being able to enlist the help of other people. You have to reach a state where others want to help you. This includes giving credit... which will come back to you a hundredfold. Your reputation stems from what people say when you're not present.

Cecil Howard Green

[The PlayStation 2 is a] historic, a mass-market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the way the printing press did.

There's no one who wants this [Deepwater Horizon oil spill] over more than I do. I'd like my life back.

Success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection.

Mistakes are a part of life; you can't avoid them. All you can hope is that they won't be too expensive and that you don't make the same mistake twice.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

Well, with regard to Syria, I do think that it's a mess. I think that the only way that we deal with Syria is to join hands with Russia to diplomatically bring that at an end. But when we've aligned ourselves with — when we've supported the opposition of the Free Syrian Army — the Free Syrian Army is also coupled with the Islamists.

Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn't matter, that doesn't try to do something big?

My theory is that when you're young, you should work eighty hours a week to create a product or service that changes the world.

I pretty much don't care what the papers say about me.

Stocks are a voting mechanism, pure and simple. They are a collective vote of expectations of each company's future fundamentals.

Some technical reports are so dry and dusty... that if you put a pile of them in a hydraulic press and apply millions of pounds of pressure to it, not a drop of juice will run out.

Charles Kettering

You should think of your customers as partners, or better still, family.

Once conclusions about the economic benefits of peace are drawn, it may be possible to transform the world through business-led initiatives, thereby helping to achieve peace and creating the environment that will make future sustainability possible.

You can communicate to a new AI. Did you ever see the movie The Matrix? Same interface. Same concept. Only better. Starting from next year, you can chat to the world's first AI!

It's difficult to change overnight but if you are persistent and take one step at a time you will see results!

What you want is protection. You want to be safe. What the government does is to try to retaliate after the fact.

Young people will have the seeds you bury in their minds and when they grow up they will change the world.

Perhaps the most eloquent of the hard virtues is courage, the disposition to encounter adversity head-on and strive to overcome it.