Quotes from Tahl Raz

There is a huge opportunity in the intermarriage trend. These are people who, if you show them how vital the community is and how great it is to raise kids Jewish, these people are going to raise their kids Jewish. Ultimately, that's all that matters.

Would it be a surprise if entrepreneurs recoil at the thought of consciously courting any person who has more power and money than they have?

Anyone can call himself a promoter. Anyone can call himself a promoter and stage a fight. Unlike other professional sports, whose owners collude out of mutual interest in their sport's image and general welfare, there are no real alliances or partnerships in boxing.

The role of president, as George W. Bush commented in 2000, requires vision, management, and an eye for talent - not so different from that of CEO. But during the first years of Carter's presidency, his Cabinet was anything but businesslike, beset by infighting and meetings that ambled.

Quality that significantly exceeds the customer's expectations doesn't seem to pay off. This 'delight the customer' stuff isn't rewarding. One has to be careful about delighting customers too often, because it sort of reshapes customer expectations.

A company logo may be the last thing cost-conscious CEOs focus on when they're looking to jump-start growth. Which is perhaps why it took more than two decades for White Mountain Footwear, a privately held shoe manufacturer based in Lisbon, N.H., to finally give its own emblem some serious thought.

When designing your product, go beyond consumers' current knowledge base. Design, test, and dig deeper than almost any client would pay you to do.

Design is the Zeppo Marx of management disciplines - the one that everyone seems to forget.

Oil wells never really run dry. A big company will drain maybe 40% of a field. Pulling out the rest of the oil, which requires an outlay of incrementally more cash per barrel, often proves uneconomical for big companies with big overheads.

Customers are enormously punishing when companies don't meet their expectations.

Pure art is a noble pursuit. Applied art is a business. That's one reason design firms have been so eager of late to add consulting and manufacturing to their core aesthetic competencies.

Schmoozers are brownnosers, sycophants more suited to middle management than to the Wild West of the entrepreneurial world.

A company's logo can be a visual ambassador, one that goes on everything from business cards to delivery trucks. When used effectively, it can be the window into the soul of a brand.

Take information technology. We have winners implementing CRM (customer relationship management systems) and losers implementing CRM. What mattered in technology is that the technology actually drives either cost reduction or superior strategy execution.

Drilling is risky because finding oil is only half the job. The real challenge is finding the money to pump the oil.

Fred Segal was founded - by none other than Fred Segal - as a tiny jeans retailer in 1968. In the 1970s Segal, began selling space to employees, starting with his nephew Ron Herman.

When the founder of World Energy Solutions Inc. assembled his first board in 2000, it consisted of nine investors and friends. The group met quarterly, generally affirming Domaleski's every action. But the Worcester, Mass., company, which auctions electricity and gas credits, lacked customers and financing. It needed more from its board to survive.

The process of unleashing worms on organic waste such as food scraps and grass clippings is known as 'vermicomposting.' Amateur horticulturists and hippies have been doing it on a small scale for decades.

Design firms and progressive companies rely on many of the same tools: rapid prototyping, observational research, creative thinking, collaborative work environments, and multidisciplinary teams.

Companies that have strong graphic identities have built them through years of use.

Sell your intellectual property based on a track record of success and innovation.

At Nike, designers both created and communicated the brand, transforming a company that made shoes into a purveyor of athletic heroism.

There is constant talk about the intermarriage crisis: who is a Jew and how we define a Jew. That doesn't go over well with young Jews trying to figure out whether they want to be a part of this thing or not.

Some of the best logos are the simplest. One of the oldest is the mark used by the Bass brewery: a red triangle. Target has made a red circle with a red dot in the middle seem the very essence of affordable, hip practicality.