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October 18 - November 2, 2025
Success is empty if you arrive at the finish line alone.
If you pour your heart into your work, or into any worthy enterprise, you can achieve dreams others may think impossible.
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received. —ALBERT EINSTEIN
Second, you don’t just give the customers what they ask for. If you offer them something they’re not accustomed to, something so far superior that it takes a while to develop their palates, you can create a sense of discovery and excitement and loyalty that will bond them to you. It may take longer, but if you have a great product, you can educate your customers to like it rather than kowtowing to mass-market appeal.
To mean something to customers, you should assume intelligence and sophistication and inform those who are eager to learn.
Life is a series of near misses. But a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see, and pursuing that vision, no matter who tells you not to.
Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager who broke the color barrier by signing on Jackie Robinson, often remarked: “Luck is the residue of design.”
There is no more precious commodity than the relationship of trust and confidence a company has with its employees. If people believe management is not fairly sharing the rewards, they will feel alienated. Once they start distrusting management, the company’s future is compromised.
Part of what constitutes success is timing and chance. But most of us have to create our own opportunities and be prepared to jump when we see a big one others can’t see.
It’s one thing to dream, but when the moment is right, you’ve got to be willing to leave what’s familiar and go out to find your own sound.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW,
It’s those who follow the road less traveled who create new industries, invent new products, build long-lasting enterprises, and inspire those around them to push their abilities to the highest levels of achievement. If you stop being the scrappy underdog, fighting against the odds, you risk the worst fate of all: mediocrity.
Even the world’s best business plan won’t produce any return if it is not backed with passion and integrity.
“It appears to me that people who succeed have an incredible drive to do something,” observes Ron. “They spend the energy to take the gamble. In this world, relatively few people are willing to take a large gamble.”
The best ideas are those that create a new mind-set or sense a need before others do,
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. —MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Establishing the right tone at the inception of an enterprise, whatever its size, is vital to its long-term success.
It’s during such vulnerable times, when the unexpected curve balls hit you hard on the head, that an opportunity can be lost. It’s also the time when your strength is tested most tellingly.
Every step of the way, I made it a point to underpromise and overdeliver. In the long run, that’s the only way to ensure security in any job.
Big opportunities lie in the creation of something new. But that innovation has to be relevant and inspiring, or it will burst into color and fade away as quickly as fireworks.
Wealth is the means and people are the ends. All our material riches will avail us little if we do not use them to expand the opportunities of our people. —JOHN F. KENNEDY, STATE OF THE UNION , JANUARY 1962
If you treat your employees as interchangeable cogs in a wheel, they will view you with the same affection.
When companies fail, or fail to grow, it’s almost always because they don’t invest in the people, the systems, and the processes they need.
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men [and women] to do what he wants done, and self -restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“As long as it is moral, legal, and ethical,” Howard likes to say, “we should do whatever it takes to please the customer.”
Processes and systems, discipline and efficiency are needed to create a foundation before creative ideas can be implemented and entrepreneurial vision can be realized.
Many young companies can’t make the leap to maturity because they either don’t support the creative spirit with structure and process, or they go too far and stifle that spirit with an overdeveloped bureaucracy.
The only sacred cow in an organization should be its basic philosophy of doing business. —THOMAS J. WATSON, JR., “A BUSINESS AND ITS BELIEFS” AS QUOTED IN BUILT TO LAST, BY JAMES C. COLLINS AND JERRY I. PORRAS
At its core must be an authentic product, one that’s better than most customers realized they wanted.
What I won’t do, though, is compromise our core values.
licensing. It’s like a marriage: Whether it works is a matter of whom you choose as a partner, the amount of due diligence you do beforehand, and how things go during the courtship. If you jump in with little preparation, you risk setting yourself up for failure.
There are only two guidelines. One, what’s in the long-term best interests of the enterprise and its stakeholders, supplemented by the dominant concern of doing what’s right. —ROBERT D. HAAS , PRESIDENT, LEVI STRAUSS & CO., AS QUOTED IN THE CORPORATE CONSCIENCE
In my experience, relationships and loyalty have become undervalued commodities at many American companies.
The best guidance comes from observing how other admired enterprises act.
being a dreamer isn’t enough. If you want to achieve something in life, you need a different set of skills to set those dreams in motion. Once you cross the divide where your dream begins to take shape, you graduate from being a dreamer to being an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurial stage of a young business is probably the most exciting one.
We’ve got to develop systems and processes, but not at the cost of stifling our creative people. If we bog down innovative ideas in bureaucratic nonsense, we will have made the same mistake hundreds of American corporations have made before us.
Sometimes what’s hardest—for me and strong-minded leaders like me—is restraining myself, allowing other people’s ideas to germinate and blossom before passing judgment.
It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested. —JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, “ABRAHAM LINCOLN,”
Ronald Henkoff wrote in November 1996, “The businesses that thrive over the long haul are likely to be those that understand that cost cutting and revenue growing aren’t mutually exclusive.
Eternal vigilance to both the top and bottom lines is the new ticket to prosperity.”
If we compromise who we are to achieve higher profits, what have we achieved? Eventually all our customers would figure out that we had sacrificed our quality, and they would no longer have a reason to walk that extra block for Starbucks.
What comes from the heart, goes to the heart. —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, TABLE TALK
STRONG BRANDS CREATE A POWERFUL PERSONAL CONNECTION
Great brands, he says, have a distinctive, memorable identity, a product that makes people look or feel better, and a strong but comfortable delivery channel, which in Starbucks’ case was the store.
All of these factors are essential, he says, but they fuse only if the management team can execute well.
We’re creating something new. We’re expanding and defining the market. We didn’t set out to steal customers away from Folgers or Maxwell House or Hills Brothers. We didn’t go for the widest possible distribution. We set out, rather, to educate our customers about the romance of coffee drinking.
The number-one factor in creating a great, enduring brand is having an appealing product. There’s no substitute.
Dave Olsen has a saying: “Coffee without people is a theoretical construct. People without coffee are somewhat diminished as well.”
Howard Behar has another: “We’re not in the coffee business serving people. We’re in the people business serving coffee.”
Vincent Eades likes to use: “If you examine a butterfly according to the laws of aerodynamics, it shouldn’t be able to fly. But the butterfly doesn’t know that, so it flies.”
