Quotes About Business

There, as in France, politicians wanted one thing and businessmen wanted another, and the latter had to pay, but they managed to get back still more. Businessmen knew that wars came and went, but business continued, and its interests were permanent

Commercial men weren't looked down upon as they had been in old England; for, after all, this was an industrial age, and business and politics were pretty thoroughly mixed. The recent Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, had been an ironmaster, and the present Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, was an arms manufacturer from Birmingham.

They had the same saying as Americans: "Les affaires sont les affaires"—business is business. When you said that, you set moral considerations aside as irrelevant; the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God were idle dreams; liberty, equality, and fraternity were bait to catch votes; the only question was, did you have the price?

In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time.

When ranked by the size of their labor force, in 1960 11 out of America's 15 largest companies (led by GM, Ford, GE, and United States Steel) were producers of goods employing more than 2.1 million workers; by 2010 just two makers of goods, HP and GE, employing about 600,000 people, were among the top 15, and the group is now dominated by retailers and service-providing firms (Walmart, UPS, McDonald's, Yum, Target).

So I've got five books, a building, and a hundred bucks. I'm starting my business tomorrow.

Larry E. Greiner's classic Harvard Business Review article titled "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow

KEY RESOURCE: Frances Frei and Anne Morriss' book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

Recruiting Is a (Guerilla) Marketing Function

At 5% pretax profit, your business is on life support. • At 10% pretax profit, the business is doing well but has some untapped potential. • At 15% pretax profit, the business is in great shape. • Anything above 15% indicates that you should earn it while you can. The market will figure out what's going on, competition will show up, and you will eventually get pushed back.

SWT Instead For senior leaders, we propose replacing the SWOT with the SWT: an updated approach that identifies inherent Strengths and Weaknesses within their firms while exploring broader external Trends beyond their own industry or geography.

Jeff Bezos asks his team each week is what competitors have entered their market in the last seven days!

Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash flow is king." You

Cash is the oxygen that fuels growth. And the cash conversion cycle (CCC) is a key performance indicator (KPI) that measures how long it takes for a dollar spent on anything (rent, utilities, marketing, payroll, etc.) to make its way through your business and back into your pocket. In

You can get by with decent People, Strategy, and Execution, but not a day without Cash. Cash becomes even more critical as the business scales up, since "growth sucks cash." The key is innovating ways to generate sufficient profit and cash flow internally, so you don't have to turn to banks (or sharks!) to fuel your growth.

KEY QUESTION: Are the stakeholders (employees, customers, shareholders) happy and engaged in the business; and would you "rehire" all of them?

Then you need to evaluate all the key relationships surrounding the business. Would you keep all your existing customers? Are you happy with your investors/bank? Are your vendors supporting you properly? Are your advisors — accountants, lawyers, consultants, and coaches — the best for the size of the organization and future plans? The toughest decisions to make are when the company has outgrown some of these relationships and you need to make changes.

For us, a People department is less of a group of functional experts focused on engagement and employee wellbeing and more of an operational unit that serves the business and supports its strategy. All People practices, including compensation, need to create tangible value for the company's stakeholders, especially for its customers.

There are roughly 28 million firms in the US, of which only 4% ever reach more than $1 million in revenue. Of those firms, only about one out of 10, or 0.4% of all companies, ever make it to $10 million in revenue, and only 17,000 companies surpass $50 million. Finishing out the list, the top 2,500 firms in the US are larger than $500 million, and the top 500 public and private firms exceed $5 billion. Data indicate that there are similar ratios in other countries.

How Fast Can Your Company Afford to Grow?" a Harvard Business Review article by Neil C. Churchill and John W. Mullins.

The Business of Happiness: 6 Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Life and Work.

1 weakness of growth firms is marketing, the #2 problem is accounting.

For additional examples, read the Harvard Business Review article titled "Building Your Company's Vision," by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras. You'll notice that all the Values listed are phrases, not single words.

si usted no está en condiciones de solventar a las personas que pueden dirigir el negocio en su lugar, usted sólo dispone de un empleo, no de un negocio.