"Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all."
- Winston Churchill -
"You need to plan the way a fire department plans: It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event."
- Andrew Stephen Grove -
"If you base your business on the volume leader, you will be going after a larger business yourself."
- Andrew Stephen Grove -
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- Alan Kay -
"Strategic changes doesn't just start at the top. It starts with your calendar."
- Andrew Stephen Grove -
"People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early."
- Andrew Stephen Grove -
"Except for one last thing. What if the people who believe in the cheap Internet appliance turn out to be right?"
- Andrew Stephen Grove -
"Career inflection points are commonplace. A story comes to mind.
It so happens that it was related to me by a business journalist who had interviewed me when this book was first published.
This man used to be a banker. He was happily and productively employed until one day he went to work and learned that his employer had been acquired
by another, larger bank. In short order he was out of a job. He decided to change careers and become a stockbroker. He knew that he would have to pay his dues.
While he was comfortable with financial matters, he knew that a banker’s skills are not the same as those required of a stockbroker.
So he went to stockbroker school and eventually started working as a full-fledged broker. For a while, things went well and the future looked promising.
However, a short time before we met, on-line brokerage firms started to appear. Several of this man’s clients left him, preferring to do their business with low-cost
on-line firms. The handwriting was on the wall. This time, our man decided to make his move early. He had always had an interest in, and aptitude for, writing.
Building on the financial knowledge that he had first acquired as a banker, and that was reinforced."
- Andrew Stephen Grove -
"But data are about the past, and strategic inflection points are about the future."
- Andrew Stephen Grove -
"I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything.
And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year
or two and probably Sears as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer,
you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks.
But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing,
and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company.
It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and
I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile,
look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam."
- Sam Walton -
"What we guard against around here is people saying, ‘Let’s think about it.’ We make a decision. Then we act on it."
- Sam Walton -
"What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate
and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to
our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get
all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that
somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our
earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to,
and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve."
- Sam Walton -
"Wal-Mart was too small and insignificant for any of the big boys to notice, and most of the promoters weren’t out in our area so we weren’t competitive.
That helped me get access to a lot of information about how they were doing things. I probably visited more headquarters offices of more discounters than anybody else—ever.
I would just show up and say, “Hi, I’m Sam Walton from Bentonville, Arkansas. We’ve got a few stores out there, and I’d like to visit with Mr.
So-and-So”—whoever the head of the company was—“about his business.” And as often as not, they’d let me in, maybe out of curiosity, and I’d ask lots of questions
about pricing and distribution, whatever. I learned a lot that way."
- Sam Walton -
"Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Pages or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them."
- Peter Thiel -
"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
- Neil Armstrong -
"His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last."