Business Leader Quotes

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Bill Gates

For the wise man, one human life is sufficient, and the stupid man will not know what to do with eternity.
William Shirer, a favorite quote of Bernard Rapoport

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
Henry Ford

I don't have to work hard, but we are changing China. It's not how much money you make, it's how you change society.
Jack Ma (As quoted in Barron's 6 June 2011)

Rapoport is a cheerful workaholic, a chronic optimist, a tennis nut, and an avid bibliophile who can't quite understand why other people don't get as much of a thrill out of working as he does.
Jim Wright on Bernard Rapoport (in Being Rapoport)

Strong people have sound ideas and the force to make these ideas effective.
Andrew Mellon

When you work twenty hours a day, when do you have time to develop friends who are not in the business?
Lee Iacocca (Iacocca, chapter 10)

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this will work. It is one characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he is leading to realize whatever he is dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King said "I have a dream. But I am not sure if they are up to it."
Benjamin Zander, TED Conference 2008

Favorite Quotes for 2011

Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand this multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the actions of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combination.
--Richard Feynman

Luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity.
--Coco Chanel

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

That's what Tolstoy meant in War and Peace when he talked about the unknown "x," that spirit that enables people to do things that just aren't reasonable to others.
--Bernard Rapoport

The Word for World is Forest does what serious science fiction does best. It shows us our own world, made strange and familiar; makes us feel the beauty and mystery of this totally extraordinary (one of a kind, you know) planet. And rails against abuses, not in polemic speeches, but though the focused lens of a simple, tragic drama. It's a minor masterpiece.
--Gwyneth Jones on Ursula K. Le Guin (from 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin)

If you break the little promises you'll break the big ones. That's what you said.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I am a trichotomist. By that I mean, when I'm in business, I'm a predator and, I hope, a civilized one; when I'm charitable, I'm philanthropic; but when I'm in politics, I'm idealistic.
--Bernard Rapoport