“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Anytime we have new forms of communication it changes behavior whether it is political or business or any type of behavior.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Choose clients as you would friends.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“The old order won’t give way to the new without a phase of experimentation and chaos in between.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left. I believe that the prime responsibility of a manager is to guard constantly against other people’s attacks and to inculcate this guardian attitude in the people under his or her management.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“You don’t need to take the last dollar.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“Fear should guide you, but it should be latent.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“I find it quite useful to think of a free market economy—partly free market economy—as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“At Harvard Business School, the great quantitative thing that bonds the first-year class together is what they call decision tree theory. All they do is take high school algebra and apply it to real-life problems. And the students love it. They’re amazed to find that high school algebra works in life.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in the business world—and get very good because they specialize—frequently find good economics that they wouldn’t get any other way.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“Embrace bad news to learn where you need the most improvement.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“If the 1980s were about quality 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity. About how quickly the nature of business will change. About how quickly business itself will be transacted.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Strategically a major function of the CEO is to look for bad news and courage the organization to respond to it. Employees must be encouraged to share bad news as much as good news.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“You ought to dream. All our biggest business men have been dreamers.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The most important speed issue is often not technical but cultural. It’s convincing everyone that the company’s survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Implement policy and business structures that tie complaints directly to a fast solution.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and/or minimizing one or a few variables—like the discount warehourses of Costco.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“A company’s ability to respond to unplanned events, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Drive thy business, or it will drive thee.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“In technology, whatever can be done will be done.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.”
— Bill Gates Primary sourceBad News Improvement Customers Fear Speed