Business quotes

The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important - and then get out of their way while they do it. My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too. If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete. Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital - the world's best talents and greatest ideas. Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be. An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages. If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own. A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business. All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else. A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large. A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one. Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.