Business Quotes

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.

Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.

Nothing can be made except by makers, nothing can be managed except by managers. Money cannot make anything and money cannot manage anything.

You can take my factories, burn up my buildings, but give me my people and I'll build the business right back again.

Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die. But when a business ceases to be creative, when it believes it has reached perfection and needs to do nothing but produce no improvement, no development, it is done.

Patience and foresight are the two most important qualities in business.

Every business is a monarchy with, not a man, but an idea as king.

I found that competition was supposed to be a menace and that a good manager circumvented his competitors by getting a monopoly by artificial means.

A manufacturer is not through with his customer when a sale is completed. He has then only started with his customer.

I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one - and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.

Money is only a tool in business. It is just a part of the machinery. You might as well borrow 100,000 lathes as $100,000 if the trouble is inside your business. More lathes will not cure it; neither will more money. Only heavier doses of brains and thought and wise courage can cure. A business that misuses what it has will continue to misuse what it can get.

The two most important things in any company do not appear in its balance sheet: its reputation and its people.

You need a forklift. Maybe because it's inexpensive [$3.99], people are going to go through the hell, but we should watch out.

If you don't give people a chance to fail... you won't innovate... if you wanna be an innovative company allow people to make mistakes.

By 1994, PepsiCo was the fifteenth-biggest US company, with annual revenue of $25 billion. It sold drinks and food in more than 150 countries and employed 450,000 people.

Good business demands tough decisions based on rigorous analysis and unwavering follow-through. Emotion can't really play a part. The challenge we all face as leaders is to let the feelings churn inside you but then to present a calm exterior, and I learned to do that.

When I was president of the company, I said, 'Okay, I can do this - piece of cake.' Then when you are the CEO, the responsibilities multiply enormously because you worry about everything.

There is nothing like a concrete life plan to weigh you down. Because if you always have one eye on some future goal, you stop paying attention the the job at hand, miss opportunities that might arise, and stay fixedly on one path, even when a better, newer course might have opened up.

The distance between number one & number two is always constant. If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you.

The one thing I have learned as a CEO is that leadership at various levels is vastly different. As you move up the organization, the requirements for leading that organization don't grow vertically; they grow exponentially.