"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn."
— Joss Whedon

"If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.' "
— Dave Barry

"If I love you, what business is it of yours?"
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Every day's a negotiation and sometimes it's done with guns."
— Joss Whedon

"There's no luck in business. There's only drive, determination, and more drive."
— Sophie Kinsella (Shopaholic Takes Manhattan)

"Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect."
— Vince Lombardi

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"
— Steve Jobs

"Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves it s amazing what they can accomplish."
— Sam Walton

"My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's."
— Oscar Wilde

"Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Men)

""We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.""
— Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World)

"To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!"
— Lillian Cauldwell

"Persistence guarantees that results are inevitable."
— Paramahansa Yogananda

"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."
— Peter Drucker

"“Does your marketing distinguish between good and bad or better and best?”"
— Daniel C. Felsted

"Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth."
— Peter Drucker

"If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation."
— Jim Collins (Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great)

"International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky."
— Alexander McCall Smith (Love Over Scotland)

"**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.**
That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision.

[first-line bold by author]
[2002] p.23"
— Gary Hamel (Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life)

""... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.

[2002] p.46"
— Gary Hamel (Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life)

"Ben Franklin said:
"Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy wealthy and wise"

Lately I have read the advice given to William Randolph Hearst, when a young man, by his father:
"Go downtown at noon and rob the other fellows of what they have made during the morning."
— Emanuel Haldeman-Julius

"If you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible."
— T. Harv Eker (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth)

"'But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"
— Charles Dickens

"An entrepreneur without funding is a musician without an instrument."
— Robert A. Rice Jr.

"Even in the face of massive competition, don’t think about the competition. Literally don’t think about them. Every time you’re in a meeting and you’re tempted to talk about a competitor, replace that thought with one about user feedback or surveys. Just think about the customer."
— Mike McCue

"Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate."
— Alain van Der Heide

"The world’s most powerful business tool is also the most misunderstood. The e-factors are all about feelings not figures and feelings rule all buying decisions!

Some e-factors are:Love, pride, fear, guilt, greed, anger, flattery, salvation, exclusivity, dramatization, duty, honor, friendship, affection, sex appeal, ego."
— Daniel C. Felsted

"In business, sir, one has no friends, only correspondents. "
— Alexandre Dumas

"We had all opted to take City's financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in their twenties, and broke, goes into journalism to write about money—a subject in which they still have zero practical experience."
— Chris Ayres (War Reporting for Cowards)

"They have to say SOMETHING. Maria Bartiromo can't exactly look into the camera and say that the Dow is down half a percent today because of random Brownian motion."
— Phil Rosenzweig (The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers)

"... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.

Leading the Revolution, 2002, p.46"
— Gary Hamel

"Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes -- while no becoming an extremist. ... **Most companies don't do paradox very well.**

(emphasis by author)
[2002] p.25f"
— Gary Hamel (Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life)

"Talent can be hired, money has to be earned. "
— -Vishnu

"It is a matter of life and death for us; for the lead we gain by day on ships and railways is lost each night."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight)

"Create the change you seek in the world.
Be an ecopreneur.
Launch your dream green business."
— John D. Ivanko

"That's the positive aspect of trade I suppose. The world gets stirred up together. That's about as much as I have to say for it."
— Isabel Hoving (The Dream Merchant)

"With some skill, a little luck and shed loads of hard work,your dream will become reality"
— Mike Clare, Founder and Chief Executive DREAMS

"Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Today, brands are not the preserve of marketing department. Brands are too important to be left to the marketing department - or any other 'department,' come to that. Organizational ghettoes do not create vibrant world-changing brands."
— Thomas Gad

"Smart people learn from their mistakes, wise people learn from the mistakes of others."
— George Lagogianes

""Learning is about seeing things froma a different perspective. My role is to help people improve their vision""
— Bob Selden