Quotes About Business

But it is part of the business of the writer—as I see it—to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.

The fact that something is a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" is irrelevant, unless it fits within the three circles. A great company will have many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities

The dominant pattern of history isn't stability, but instability; the dominant pattern of business isn't perpetuation of the incumbents, but triumph of the insurgents; the dominant pattern of capitalism isn't equilibrium, but what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as the "perennial gale of creative destruction

The same thing happens in business. When people become fat with conventional wisdom, they're dangerous. A lot of being innovative in business is being willing to give something a try because you don't know it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. As Debi Colman, Apple VP of information systems and technology, puts it: "The single biggest roadblock to creativity and innovation I've encountered in business is conventional wisdom.

Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.

Turning Goals into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms," Harvard Business Review, July–August, 1999.

And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business cannot form the basis of your Hedgehog Concept.

The talk had turned to business, and in the few short hours she had learned more about Hong Kong techniques than through all the reading she had done. More and more it was clear that unless you were on the inside, real power and real riches would escape you.

The point of business was to make just enough money to keep going, not to create a monster of productivity that chained a person to the wheels of power and stifled all creativity and imagination. Business should not be profit-driven; it should be idea-driven.

The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.

If there's one thing that's certain in business, it's uncertainty.

My friends call me a 'pace-setter.' Sometimes I am impatient, I think, but you must be fast and flexible in business because uncertainty is the only certainty in life.

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

Increased business sales would almost certainly raise the productive capacity of the economy by encouraging additional capital spending, especially if accompanied by reduced uncertainty about future prospects.

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.

Uncertainty is seen to retard investment independently of considerations of risk or expected return.

One of the things that has been very difficult in Libya is the sense of uncertainty - the sense that they haven't actually finished the revolution, that there was still a great deal of uncertainty. That uncertainty has made Libya harder for business in terms of oil and other things as well.

Most business people today are not going to invest in the uncertainty that exists in America.

As policymakers, we need to foster an environment that allows U.S.-based innovators and entrepreneurs to compete and to flourish. Excessive regulations and bureaucratic red tape dramatically increase the cost of doing business and create uncertainty for companies.

No one has any idea what's next... the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it's delaying the recovery.

Uncertainty is killing this economy.

I'm a small businessman and I'm well aware of the uncertainties of the economy, exactly what the 'inflationary spiral' means when I'm forced to raise prices to my customers, and how taxes can eat into your earnings.

If you think about a business where uncertainty is an anathema, it's around consumer spending, and it's around retail.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.