Quotes from Lee Iacocca

In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits.

Management is nothing more than motivating other people.

Thanks to properly selecting the clients you will not be unnecessarily wasting time.

I forgot to shake hands and be friendly. It was an important lesson about leadership.

I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That's a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.

The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.

To succeed today, you have to set priorities, decide what you stand for.

I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.

Any supervisor worth his salt would rather deal with people who attempt too much than with those who try too little.

I'd really love to meet the guy I'm supposed to be. I'd hire him in a second.

In a corporation, there can only be one guy in the end: the CEO.

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.

As you go through life, there are thousands of little forks in the road, and there are a few really big forks-those moments of reckoning, moments of truth.

I guess I invented extended warranties, because that's all we had to sell at Chrysler in those days.

If a guy is over 25 percent jerk, he's in trouble. And Henry was 95 percent.

People want economy, and they'll pay any price to get it.

There comes a time when you've got to say, "Let's get off our asses and go ..." I have always found that if I move with 75 percent or more of the facts I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.

If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late.

So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late.

The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do - they always reach.

Incompetency begets incompetency. The last thing a guy who isn't sure of himself wants is a guy backing him up who is sure of himself.

Chrysler invented rebates, I'm sorry to say. I didn't have anything to do with that. A lot of flaky deals were made in order to give the customer enough cash for a down payment.

I was at Ford for 32 years. I went to Chrysler in 1978, four or five months after I got canned by Henry Ford.

The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything.