Quotes About Business

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning "economies of scale," size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.

No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.

Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. As we saw in Chapter 8, restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests.

Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcomes that counts.

There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing, and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted factories in developing countries do the grunt work and engineers in cultured and mathematical states do the noncreative technical grind

Rewriting the history of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur?

The dentist did better when he dealt with monthly statements rather than more frequent ones.

The last thing a trader needs to do is be scientific or play econometrician during buisness hours.

cualquier cosa atrapada en la planificación tiende a fracasar, precisamente, a causa de estos atributos: es un mito que la planificación ayude a las grandes empresas porque, como hemos visto, el mundo es demasiado aleatorio e imprevisible para basar una política en la visibilidad del futuro. Lo que sobrevive surge de la interacción entre la adaptabilidad y algunas condiciones del entorno.

The central point: had Stiglitz been a businessman with his own money on the line, he would have blown up, terminated. Or had he been in nature, his genes would have been made extinct—so people with such misunderstanding of probability would eventually disappear from our DNA. What I found nauseating was the government hiring one of his coauthors.

People go to business school to learn how to do well while ensuring their survival—but what the economy, as a collective, wants them to do is to not survive, rather to take a lot, a lot of imprudent risks themselves and be blinded by the odds. Their respective industries improve from failure to failure

It netted a 4.5% revenue

that strange activity called the business meeting, in which well-fed, but sedentary, men voluntarily restrict their blood circulation with an expensive device called a necktie.

the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life)

You can tell people who come from countries with rent seeking; they think that business is zero-sum: wealth is money taken from others.

that they wouldn't advertise it so loudly if it weren't good for their bottom line.

So I have, accordingly, except for eight years, been self-employed.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots.

Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business).

could cause a loss of business