Categories:
- Rallying the Team
- Personal Success
- Thoughts on Innovation
- Overcoming Challenges
- Conquering Fear
- Dealing with Failure
- Ins and Outs of Entrepreneurship
Rallying the Team
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
Design is an agent of change, which can help us to make sense of what is happening and to turn it to our advantage.
If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth.
Nothing is easy. If you want to do nothing, that’s easy.
Terrible is the temptation to do good!
Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
It’s not a good strategy until it costs you something to pursue.
God gave us 2 ears and 1 mouth for a reason.
To understand a company, spend time with its customers.
Be careful – a little success can create a whole lot of overhead.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Make sure that the best thing to happen to your customer today is you.
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
Make no little plans.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.
Good enough never is.
An entrepreneur is someone who shoots an arrow and then runs to move the target, so the arrow hits it.
Storms make trees take deeper roots.
Never get angry. Never make a threat. Reason with people.
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’
Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
You can’t really run the company by pissing off the scientists who do the work.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss in enthusiasm.
I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.
He that can’t endure the bad will not live to see the good.
We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
Even if you are on the right track, the train will run you over if you just sit there.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.
Strategy – is figuring out what is the most important thing for your company and deciding to focus on it and say no to everything else.
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.
If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.
If you presume, you are putting ‘P’ on your resume.
Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.
With good people, you can do anything. With bad people, nothing helps.
Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, and abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.
Choice is the enemy of decision.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.
Always make new mistakes.
Deliberation is the work of many men. Action, of one alone.
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!
I believe that smart people working hard will eventually get lucky.
I don’t want the revenue; I just want the profit.
You want to learn from experience, but you want to learn from other people’s experience when you can.
Entrepreneurship exists in the tiny space between madness and genius; and, its journey requires a few cross border violations across both madness and genius to get to the final destination.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
We’re not trying to entertain the critics… I’ll take my chances with the public.
There is nothing so depressing as boundless optimism.
Focus on doing things that can’t hurt and might help. You’ll always be ahead.
Add the quote.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I don’t have a lot of regrets.
Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.
Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.
In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning in indispensable.
Feed the strong, starve the weak. Lead with your strength and avoid protecting the weak – weak brands, weak products and weak people. Know your strengths and lead with them.
I don’t know what the price is, but the price knows what the price is.
Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.
I see the light when I feel the heat.
Sleep on your big decisions and then be decisive.
There are only two problems in business: 1. Not enough orders. 2. Not enough capacity to ship the orders.
Great advertising can make food taste better, can make your car run smoother.
Too many kings can ruin an army.
The meek shall inherit the earth – but not its mineral rights.
We was doin’ good till we blowed up!
Profit gives us resources.
A smooth sea never made for a skillful sailor.
A leader’s job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room.
Leaders define reality and provide hope.
Try your best to make goodness attractive.
The impossible missions are the only ones that succeed.
Looking forward, people need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Change before you have to.
The job of tech transfer manager is to make something happen – without getting fired.
The four most important words in business are ‘What do you think?’
First, they ignore you. Then, they laugh at you. Then, they fight you. Then, you win.
The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘We’ve always done it this way.’
You can never complete the work, nor must you abandon it.
We shall make no progress today.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Purpose motivates employees better than profit. They are proud if they can say, ‘Our company is making the world cleaner, the food healthier.’
I would rather fail at something I love than succeed at something I hate.
By and large the citizens are proud of their great orchestra; and by and large, the citizens have never heard it.
The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
Retail is detail.
I think strategic planning is the antithesis of building a corporation.
Religion either leads to a deeper reflection or a greater certainty.
Accommodate changing times but cling to unchanging principles.
Panic is not a strategy.
Nobody cares about your product, service or solution. All they care about is the difference you can make for their organization.
Angels who won’t conduct postmortems climb the ladder of success wrong by wrong.
Too little confidence, and you’re unable to act; too much confidence, and you’re unable to hear.
When assessing ‘first mover advantage’ remember that mousetraps demonstrate the wisdom of being the second mouse.
Raising your first VC round can be like bobbing for piranhas.
I made it because I believed I’d make it.
History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers. Customers always win.
What is not possible is not to choose.
Problems don’t age well.
People fire themselves.
Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.
If you have perfect customer analytics, you will know how to find people who look like your current customer. But if you focus only on them, you will never get any new business.
Working a little harder to keep a customer now is a lot smarter than working a lot harder later to get a new customer.
Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget.
Your results may be worthless or misleading … but at least the data was easy to collect and you got published.
Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency.
For some entrepreneurs it’s better to be never than late.
The darkest nights produce the brightest stars.
Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.
Proving it will be a homerun ahead of the swing is impossible! You have to try for a hit first and sometimes it turns into a homerun.
People will remember stories long after they have forgotten your bullet points.
Expedite the inevitable.
Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits, but the animating force for achieving them.
The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.
I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
Purpose is not a mere tagline or marketing campaign, it is a company’s fundamental reason for being.
In my next life, I will try to commit more errors.
The seven smartest words in the English language are: ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out.’
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
There’s no decision you should ever make that would embarrass you if it became public.
For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.
Someone needs to do something about this.
Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith.
People have anxiety about ambiguity.
We’re imperfect people pursuing perfect ideas and there’s tremendous frustration in the gap.
Even a correct decision is wrong when it was taken too late.
We’re not funding Mother Teresa. We’re funding imperial, will-to-power people who want to crush their competition.
You can’t let your past hold your future hostage.
The first person you lead is you.
What got you here won’t get you there.
My advice on firing is simple. Treat that person the same way you’d want to be treated if you were in that situation. They’re still a good person, just not the right fit.
Integrity is a binary state. You either have it or you don’t
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there.
The first 98% of the engineering design takes 98% of the time. The remaining 2% of the design work takes the other 98% of the time.
Not knowing what you’re doing has nothing to do with where you’re going.
We were given some great advice early on: Strategy is what you don’t do. Whenever we do anything, we ask ourselves, ‘Is this true to Warby Parker?’
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.
A business exists to create a customer.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
After 35 years, there is not a shred of evidence that stock-based compensation by company officers is correlated with company performance.
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
A leader is a dealer in hope.
The harder I work, the luckier I get!
Innovation often originates outside existing organizations, in part because successful organizations acquire a commitment to the status quo and a resistance to ideas that might change it.
Politicians are the same everywhere. They promise to build a bridge even when there’s no river.
Long as the night will be, the sun will rise without you.
If everything is important, then nothing is.
Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.
Whatever people … do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike.
Listening to advice often accomplishes far more than heeding it.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optimist sees the glass as half full. The engineer sees the glass as twice the size it needs to be.
If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big: you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously.
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
The old definition of leadership is ‘look at me, I’m a leader.’ But the new definition should be ‘No, actually, look at you – I’m listening.’
Organizations resist innovation because people are more comfortable with what they know than what they don’t.
All you need is faith, trust and pixie dust!
A setback is a setup for a comeback.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It may be a different age, but I’m on the same page. ‘Cause one thing I’ve found. I still be digging on James Brown.
Done is better than perfect.
The best sales professionals are experts in and advocates for their buyers. They won’t represent companies they don’t believe in. They won’t get on a call without being prepared to make the most of their and their prospect’s time. They know how to leverage every technology, colleague and contact to augment their skills in order to produce optimal outcomes. They welcome coaching, exercise discipline with their time, do their homework and win for the team. They are true athletes.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.
You cannot control cattle at a high rate of speed. They have the capacity to tire out and just stand there, and they will not move. Slow is fast – cattle don’t wear a wristwatch.
Whether individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead not for them, but for ourselves.
Facts tell. Stories sell.
Decide what your [company] purpose is and write it down. That way, you won’t lie to yourself.
They tried to be too clever, and that was their undoing.
It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.
Failing to plan, is planning to fail.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go long, go together.
Our company is guided by three deeply held beliefs: That brands with purpose grow, companies with purpose last and people with purpose thrive.
The best audience is intelligent, well-educated and a little drunk.
I think and think for months and years, ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time, I am right.
The biggest thing about negotiating: You’ve got to make sure you’re trying to construct a good deal for them.
Elon cares a lot about humanity, but he doesn’t really care about individual people all that much.
I am not a fan of lost causes. But a … of causes not yet won.
Take my factories and my money but leave me my salesmen and I’ll be back where I was in two years.
In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
People have a historical memory that goes back to breakfast.
Nothing new ever happened before.
It’s not success you want to be remembered for, but significance.
Trust your mistakes.
I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present.
If you are going to doubt something, doubt your limits.
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
Anytime anybody says, ‘It’s good enough,’ it’s shitty.
If you watch entrepreneurs long enough, you observe that innovation is typically a ground game, not a Hail Mary pass.
