Business quotes

Today's work must be done today

In politics it matters not what the facts are. what matter is what people believe, because vote on the basis what they believe not on what the facts are.

There’s a Time to Make and a Time to Manage

"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration." — Ray Ozzie

"Faire mieux si possible, ce qui est toujours possible (Do better if possible and that is always possible)"

"It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own." MARCUS AURELIUS

Steve Jobs said that "death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent." "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition…Everything else is secondary." Yet it is so easy to forget this. And really smart humans forget it all the time—and have for centuries.

Digital allows you to do much more quickly. Instead of developing a plan, you develop the thing, the beta. You must show how it works. Digital is fast. Digital is do.

"Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." –Ray Kroc

"Be undeniably good. No marketing effort or social media buzzword can be a substitute for that." –Anthony Volodkin

People Don’t Want Something Truly New, They Want the Familiar Done Differently.

"Don't try to be original, just try to be good." –Paul Rand

"The only thing worse than starting something and failing … is not starting something." –Seth Godin

"When I'm old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say, 'Wow, that was an adventure,' not, 'Wow, I sure felt safe.'" –Tom Preston-Werner

"What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: Know your product better than anyone. Know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed." –Dave Thomas

"The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer." –Nolan Bushnell

Captatio benevolentiae (Latin for "winning of goodwill") is a rhetorical technique aimed to capture the goodwill of the audience at the beginning of a speech or appeal. It was practiced by Roman orators, with Cicero considering it one of the pillars of oratory. During the Middle Ages it was used in court cases to gain the judge's favor, with lavish praise of the judge's wisdom considered most effective by Guillaume Durand. In parallel, the techniques of the captatio benevolentiae began to be used in the prologues of chivalric romance novels, addressing the readers and trying to have them view the work favourably.

Between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology, meaning "having to choose between two evils". Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express the same meaning.

A Hobson's choice is a free choice in which only one option is actually offered. As a person may refuse to take that option, the choice is therefore really decided between taking the option or not. In other words, one may "take it or leave it." The phrase is said to originate with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in his stall nearest the door or taking none at all.

Doublethink is the act of ordinary people simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.[1] Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy and neutrality. Somewhat related but almost the opposite is cognitive dissonance, where contradictory beliefs cause conflict in one's mind. Doublethink is notable due to a lack of cognitive dissonance — thus the person is completely unaware of any conflict or contradiction.

SPQR means, in English, the Senate and the Roman people (or the Senate and the people of Rome) Senatus Populus que Romanus.

A few years ago I became convinced that the people who worked for me should work from home more. I was influenced in this by the work of Nassim Taleb, who argues that a high degree of variation may be better than monotonous pursuit of a supposedly optimal average. This led me to think it might be better to partition work into periods of high sociability interspersed with days of self–seclusion, as an alternative to the neither-fish-nor-fowl halfway-house of the open-plan office.

The biggest challenge for many business leaders is to see their role as orchestrating, not commanding

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that is it too low and we reach it.

"Most things are not obtained simply because they are not attempted." —Balthasar Gracian

Social media companies openly proclaim their fealty to the party line and remove anyone who has the temerity to challenge it.

You already know what you need to do. The work is to figure out why you're not.

Mastery is the process of continuing to solve the same problem in new ways rather than stopping at an acceptable solution.

Run out of time. Don't run out of path.

"The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us." - N.N.Taleb

"Ideas come and go, stories stay."

Conversations are dancing, not boxing

The open office is dead. Good riddance. Managers can finally stop parading about nonsensical justifications about how people working close together creates "spontaneous collaboration." It's always been about cost—and mimcry.

Stop needing to know, rest in uncertainty

Every winning strategy has size limit and an expiration date.

Built to Last and Good to Great

“People forget how close Amazon was to getting bankrupt before recovering,” Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance and equity valuation, recalled.

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do. Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic. [Steve Jobs]