Quotes About Business

Call on a business man only at business times, and on business; transact your business, and go about your business, in order to give him time to finish his business.

The more I do this creative work teaching the "Personal Creativity in Business" course at Stanford the more I realize that business is about people in groups being creative in their own way. If business creativity does not allow individual development, then it isn't sustainable. But if business creativity means people bringing out their best and developing that, then amazing things can happen - not only for the business but also more importantly for the individual and the surrounding community.

Time is the friend of the wonderful business. It's the enemy of the lousy business. If you're in a lousy business for a long time, you're going to get a lousy result, even if you buy it cheap. If you're in a wonderful business for a long time, even if you pay a little too much going in, you're going to get a wonderful result if you stay in a long time.

Yes, business really does change. 400 years ago, corporations were formed by royal decree. 300 years ago, many countries were powered by slave labour, or its closest moral equivalent. 200 years ago, debtors didn't go bankrupt, they went to prison. 100 years ago - well, business is largely the same as it was a century ago. And that's exactly the problem. Business hasn't changed, but today's array of tectonic global shocks demands a different, radically better kind of business. Yesterday's corporations visibly cannot meet today's economic challenges.

You can invest to create the new growth business while the core business is still growing, because new business units don't need to get big fast. But when the core business stops growing, investing to create new growth businesses becomes impossible.

The pressure of show business is on all the time and show business is a fickle business. Whatever is popular now - that's all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I'm doing and why.

The transformation at the corporate level was achieved by selling off business units in old markets and by creating new business units to pursue the new opportunities. But the individual business units themselves within those transformed corporations were almost inert to change.

There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness - but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: 'Go and become a philanthropist.' I said, 'No, I can do that in the business world, create a different kind of business - a business based on selflessness.'

If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by a tenth of a cent, then you've got a terrible business. I've been in both, and I know the difference.

Business is not just doing deals; business is having great products, doing great engineering, and providing tremendous service to customers. Finally, business is a cobweb of human relationships.

Generally, the technology that enables disruption is developed in the companies that are the practitioners of the original technology. That's where the understanding of the technology first comes together. They usually can't commercialize the technology because they have to couple it with the business model innovation, and because they tend to try to take all of their technologies to market through their original business model, somebody else just picks up the technology and changes the world through the business model innovation.

It is way less certain to be a wonderful business in the future. The threat is alternative mediums of information. Every newspaper is scrambling to parlay their existing advantage into dominance on the Internet. But it is way less sure [that this will occur] than the certainty 20 years ago that the basic business would grow steadily, so there's more downside risk. The perfectly fabulous economics of this business could become grievously impaired.

Stripe makes it easy for anyone, be it an individual or a small business or a large business, to accept credit card payments on the Internet. We want to give control to the user or the business to define what the experience looks like. We work on a website or a mobile app, or whatever between that.

The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe. When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war.

There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.

I think a business guy is different from an artist. They walk different paths. Artists create the best outputs when they're having fun. And when a good business partner supports them from the side, it creates great synergy. When someone's trying to do both, I think the music gets bad and the business gets bad, too.

If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.

The record business is an oxymoron. In the 1960s, there was an upside to selling plastic discs so labels took the risk - they paid for the record, for marketing, promotion, publicity, everything it took to make the artist a star. But now we have to go back to the venture capital model. The business is stopping and everyone's complaining but you can't blame labels. It's a shitty business. You do it because you're passionate, or because it's what you've always known. But if you lived through the nineties, nobody is thinking this is great compared to what it used to be.

There's no difference in dealing with the music business with the majors than any other competition. The music business is way more cutthroat than any other business.

The business of Mr. Bennett's life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennett's was to get them married.

Cash is the lifeblood of your business. There are very few things in business that will kill you, but running our of cash is one of those things. You can recover from almost any other mistake, but if you run out of cash you're dead.

How many times have you been out for a beer or dinner and people are coming up with business ideas? Everybody wants to think they've got that great business idea.

Apple really has no presence in business, and we think Vista's going to have a huge presence in business. We think we're going to help the corporate IT stack save money.

I've often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes.

An underpaid man is a customer reduced in purchasing power. He cannot buy. Business depression is caused by weakened purchasing power. Purchasing power is weakened by uncertainty or insufficiency of income. The cure of business depression is through purchasing power, and the source of purchasing power is wages.

Most entrepreneurs fail because they are working IN their business rather than ON their business.

A successful economic development strategy must focus on improving the skills of the area's workforce, reducing the cost of doing business and making available the resources business needs to compete and thrive in today's global economy.

I don't like to hear anybody in show business complain, because I just find it to be such a grateful business. Because there are so many wonderful, creative souls out there and there are so few jobs. And, so, I just find myself thinking to myself "wow, if I could get into a show of any kind and have it last for a while" - that's when I find myself really happy.

The greatest challenge I think is adjusting to not playing baseball. The reason for that is I had to come out of baseball and come into the business world, not being a college graduate, not being educated to come into the business world the way I should have.

If you have so much business to attend to that you have no time to pray, depend upon it that you have more business on hand than God ever intended you should have.

To invest successfully, you need not understand beta, efficient markets, modern portfolio theory, option pricing or emerging markets. You may, in fact, be better off knowing nothing of these. That, of course, is not the prevailing view at most business schools, whose finance curriculum tends to be dominated by such subjects. In our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses - How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices.

We Experiment Endlessly, With New Products, New Methods, New Companies And New Marketing. A Successful Business The Emphasis Is On Experiment And Development, Ideas Are The Lifeblood Of Business.

I was working with an extraordinarily successful company that was doing a CEO succession, and the board was discussing the threats to the business. They were enormous, despite the company's strong market position. I then realized that there were no longer just turn-around periods for companies in trouble, that now variables that could drastically effect any business's profitability were not going to go away.

And what most people don't understand is the bulk of business in this country is small business.

I'd get kicked out of buildings all day long, people would rip up my business card in my face. It's a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.

Washington has to become an ally of business, not the opposition of business.

In the afternoon, the king and queen sat to hear the business of their kingdom. At least, the queen sat to hear the business; Costis was still not sure what the king was doing.

Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.

Love fulfilled sees where we could have gone the way of love before, if we'd known how, and how insecurities limited many of our choices. Love fulfilled perceives new meaning and higher reasons behind many of the mysteries of why things happened as they did. Living from the heart is business - the business of caring for self and others.

The humanities of business in this age have become more important than the techniques of business.

The problem is that many times people suspend their common sense because they get drowned in business models and Harvard business school teachings.

I ended up buying business.com for $150,000 because I wanted to make it a magazine. It would have been a 'Time'-type magazine: how to do business on the Internet. And I was offered a lot of money for that domain. I played two buyers against each other.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

You go ask any founder of any company why he or she did it, you will never hear, "I wanted to create jobs for the community" as the number one, number two, number three, number four, number five, number 10 reason for doing so. That is a result of the success the business enjoys. Creating jobs is not why people start businesses. Creating jobs is not how people innovate in business. It's not how they compete.

The people in business must understand what they can achieve with designers. Designers have to understand that they really must deliver to business not just beautification, or another form of it, but substantial change.

It was a culture that business is something bad - it was a leftist-oriented psychology. We have to break this. We are pro-business.

I keep my kids out of the whole business entirely. Allegra and Lucas are five and six and I'm not interested in them doing any acting at all. I don't want my kids in show business. I keep them as far away from my work as possible.