Quotes About Business

Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

Some boy in my class said Chinese people do Chinese torture." "Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

The ideology of New York City was, is, and probably always will be profit.

I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of the fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be a matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality.

To secure a contract, a company must secure the support not merely of a senior prince, often through an established agent through whom very substantial commissions have to be paid; but also of many ministers and officials down the line.'74

Together, Mertins and Cummings were a formidable arms-dealing force. In 1965 they worked together to sell seventy-four US-made F-86 fighter planes to Venezuela, fifty-four of which were surplus German stock and a further twenty procured from active Luftwaffe service.24 It was a hugely profitable deal.

general amorality of the weapons business in their disdain for any kind of control over the arms trade, their dislike of attempts to promote peace, and their willingness to use bribes.

Making money is art. And working is art. And good business is the best art.

Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business. They'd say "money is bad" and "working is bad". But making money is art, and working is art - and good business is the best art.

Being in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art, and good business is the best art

Rule #1: The customer is always right. Rule #2: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule #1. -Duncan Howe

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell needs to get business lobbyists in a car and drive them around with a gun to their heads for an hour, explaining: We can give you regulatory reform, OSHA reform, tax relief, tort reform. But if we give you immigration, we won't be in a position to give you anything else, ever again, and you'll have to take your chances with Nancy Pelosi. The Chamber of Commerce has got to learn: You can't have it all.

If you don't listen to your customers, someone else will.

Our last Army posting was in Salt Lake City, and I went to the library there and checked out every book on retailing. I also spent a lot of my off-duty time studying ZCMI, the Mormon Church's department store out there, just figuring that when I got back to civilian life I would somehow go into the department store business

But this is really the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.

It made me mad, anyway, that all they wanted to talk about was my family's personal finances. They weren't even interested in Wal-Mart, which was probably one of the best business stories going on anywhere in the world at the time, but it never even occurred to them to ask about the company.

In those days, I tried to operate on a 2 percent general office expense structure. In other words, 2 percent of sales should have been enough to carry our buying office, our general office expense, my salary, Bud's salary—and after we started adding district managers or any other officers—their salaries too. Believe it or not, we haven't changed that basic formula from five stores to two thousand stores.

We opened one, store number 8 in Morrilton, Arkansas, that was really a sight. We rented this old Coca-Cola bottling plant. It was all broken up into five rooms, and we bought some old fixtures from a failing Gibson's store for $3,000. We hung them by baling wire from the ceiling. We had clothes hanging in layers on conduit pipe all the way to the ceiling, and shelves wired into the walls. But this was really a small, small town, so number 8 was another experiment. We

JIM WALTON: "Dad always said you've got to stay flexible. We never went on a family trip nor have we ever heard of a business trip in which the schedule wasn't changed at least once after the trip was underway. Later, we all snickered at some writers who viewed Dad as a grand strategist who intuitively developed complex plans and implemented them with precision. Dad thrived on change, and no decision was ever sacred.

Plus, as I've said, if you don't want to work weekends, you shouldn't be in retail. But

Then I said to myself, "Well, I'm getting pretty old, and we could probably work together. I'll let him be chairman and CEO, and I'll just enjoy myself, step back a little, and, of course, continue to visit stores." So I became chairman of the Executive Committee. Ron became chairman and CEO of the company. Ferold became president.

In the global economy, successful business is going to do just what Wal-Mart is always trying to do: give more and more responsibility for making decisions to the people who are actually on the firing line, those who deal with the customers every day.

What followed became known as "the exodus." First, a whole group of senior managers who had been part of Ron's team—our financial officer, our data processing manager, the guy who was running our distribution centers—all walked out behind him. You can imagine how Wall Street felt about that.