Good Profit Quotes

“Those who favor a “grand plan” over experimentation fail to understand the role that failed experiments play in creating progress in society. Failures quickly and efficiently signal what doesn’t work, minimizing waste and redirecting scarce resources to what does work. A market economy is an experimental discovery process, in which business failures are inevitable and any attempt to eliminate them only ensures even greater failures.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“My lessons weren’t specific to business, but they were fundamental values—integrity, humility, responsibility, work ethic, entrepreneurship, a thirst for knowledge, the desire to make a contribution, and concern for others—that profoundly influenced the way I do business and live my life to this day.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“Allowing people the freedom to pursue their own interests (within the limits of just conduct) is the best and only sustainable way to achieve societal progress. For individuals to develop and have a chance at happiness, they must be free to make their own choices and mistakes, rather than be forced to accept choices made for them by others.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“Principled Entrepreneurship™—creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity. Good profit comes from making a contribution in society—not from corporate welfare or other ways of taking advantage of people.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON (ATTRIBUTED)1”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage, without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The process of discovery begins when we observe, often vaguely, a gap between what is and what could be. Our intuition tells us something better is just beyond the range of our mind’s eye. To build a culture of discovery, we must encourage, not discourage, the passionate pursuit of hunches (no matter their origin).”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“Polanyi argued that we only truly know something—that is, have personal knowledge of it—when we can apply it to get results.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort. —JOSEPH SCHUMPETER1”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“To succeed, a business must not only develop profit and loss measures, but also determine their underlying drivers, in order to understand what is adding value, what is not, and why. This knowledge informs its vision and strategies, leads to innovations, creates opportunities to eliminate waste, and guides continuous improvement.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“But, although the future is unknowable, it is not unimaginable. As Ludwig von Mises put it: “The entrepreneurial idea that carries on and brings profit is precisely that idea which did not occur to the majority. It is not correct foresight as such that yields profits, but foresight better than that of the rest. The prize goes only to the dissenters, who do not let themselves be misled by the errors accepted by the multitude.”6”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“relentlessly strive to come up with new and better products and produce them more efficiently than the alternatives.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“By “good profit,” I don’t mean high margins or high return on capital, or lots of profit by just any means. What I consider to be good profit comes from Principled Entrepreneurship™—creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity. Good profit comes from making a contribution in society—not from corporate welfare or other ways of taking advantage of people.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The bottom line of my business philosophy can best be summed up as follows: Good profit can only result from creating value for the customer. It is the manifestation of the entrepreneur’s respect for what the customer values.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“But be careful: Measures are only beneficial if they lead to profitable action. It is tempting to measure things simply because they are easy to measure; instead, we need to measure things that matter, even when it is difficult to do so. “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts,”4 Einstein observed.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“4. Principled Entrepreneurship: This principle—so central to our culture that we had it trademarked—is defined as “maximizing the long-term profitability of the business by creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity.” Creating value for society requires Principled Entrepreneurship—not political or other forms of entrepreneurship, such as corporate welfare or fraud.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“Every organization has its own culture. If that culture is not created consciously and purposively, it will degenerate into a cult of personality or an “anything goes” environment. Whether good or bad, an organization’s culture is determined by the values, beliefs, and conduct of its members, as well as the rules and incentives set by its leaders—and modeled by them behaviorally. Koch’s core values are incorporated in our MBM Guiding Principles and our Code of Conduct, which experience convinces us are critical for good profit in the long term.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The point is that progress—whether in business, an economy, or science—comes through experimentation and failure”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“that this was a lesson my father impressed on me at an early age: “Often adversity is a blessing in disguise and is certainly the greatest character builder.” Fred Koch’s”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“beneficial rules of exchange” are “the right of possession, its transference by consent, and the performance of promises.”12 This”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“Life for the overwhelming majority of people who haven’t been blessed to live in a free society has been, as Hobbes put it, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”8”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“Rather than squandering our scarcest resource (talent) trying to save a marginal business, we’ve learned to focus that resource on opportunities with real potential.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The size of the experiment should have been limited in proportion to the risk-adjusted potential of the opportunity.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“I should regret very much to have you miss the glorious feeling of accomplishment and I know you are not going to let me down. Remember that often adversity is a blessing in disguise and is certainly the greatest character builder.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“She personified a principled regard for the community, which to me reflects Adam Smith’s vision: And hence it is, that to feel much for others, and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety.3”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“interview process typically consists of a series of separate interviews, with each interviewer assessing a candidate’s alignment with a unique set of personal traits. These traits are arranged as focus areas based on our Guiding Principles and are as follows: (1) Integrity and Compliance; (2) Value Creation, Principled Entrepreneurship, and Customer Focus; (3) Knowledge and Change; (4) Humility and Respect; and (5) Skills and Knowledge required in the role.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“The role of business in society is to help people improve their lives by providing products and services they value more highly than their alternatives, and to do so while consuming fewer resources.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“If producers knew not only what consumers want now, but what they will want in the future, their job would be pretty easy.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies

“This was Good Profit 101: providing the best hassle-free service to our clients at the lowest cost to them and attracting the best employees based on the opportunities we offered. Our goal was—and still is—to be the counterparty of choice to our customers, vendors, communities, and employees.”
― Charles G. Koch, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies