Best Companies To Work For Quotes & Sayings

clients, the wider community, and the environment. Said differently, companies are human communities. If we once begin to think of our places of work not as something divorced from the rest of life, but as communities that are a vital dimension of our existence as people, and in fact at the heart of a meaningful life, a fundamentally different idea of how a company should operate enters the picture. — Catherine Bell

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That's the way the government does things. They do something really big that's really bad, and they think, Well, we'll make it better, and then it never gets better.
Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013 — Paul Graham

So when you go up against the Far Right you go up against the big financial special interests like the Halliburtons of the world, the big oil companies, the big energy companies who work so hard to rip us off. — Barbara Boxer

One of the failures of technology companies is that they build technologies thinking everything else will work out. — Steve Jobs

I work in film, TV, commercials and do live PR stunts for companies. A lot of my time is spent reading scripts and looking at designing sequences, speaking to directors and producers about how they want the sequences to look, how they will work and budgeting those stunts. — Steve Truglia

[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion. — Dan Ariely

It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really matters - and that's surviving. — Richard Branson

When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves. — Brenda Laurel

Over the years, I have repeated Eric's advice to countless people, encouraging them to reduce their career spreadsheets to one column: potential for growth. Of course, not everyone has the opportunity or the desire to work in an industry like high tech. But within any field, there are jobs that have more potential for growth than others. Those in more established industries can look for the rocket ships within their companies - divisions or teams that are expanding. And in careers like teaching or medicine, the corollary is to seek out positions where there is high demand for those skills. For example, in my brother's field of pediatric neurosurgery, there are some cities with too many physicians, while others have too few. My brother has always elected to work where his expertise would be in demand so he can have the greatest impact. Just — Sheryl Sandberg

In my view the successful companies of the future will be those that integrate business and employees' personal values. The best people want to do work that contributes to society with a company whose values they share, where their actions count and their views matter. — Jeroen Van Der Veer

We really think highly of the executives at SBC. And Microsoft is one of the great companies of the 21st century. It is in all of our best interests to work together. In this new wave of technology, you can't do it all yourself; you have to form alliances. — Carlos Slim

LinkedIn allows you to search histories and CVs in your network - it's great for finding people who work in a particular company, or who have worked with someone you know. It's also an interesting way to find references for people or companies you're getting to know. — Joichi Ito

The problem in today's economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman's intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee. — John Medina

From my years of work with so many game show production companies and their producers I'm probably no longer eligible to be a contestant on any American game show. — Randy West

The companies that make meaningful contributions while also listening to the voices of others are the ones that will genuinely engage their community, who will then go to work for them. — Simon Mainwaring

I'd like to work with some of the videogame companies for the simple fact that they obviously need some sort of writer's help. I play videogames, and lately it's hard for me to enjoy them because I'm spending all my time cringing at the corny dialogue, thin characters, and glaring plot holes. — Patrick Rothfuss

Most companies' culture just happens; no one plans it. That can work, but it means leaving a critical component of your success to chance. Elsewhere in this book we preach the value of experimentation and the virtues of failure, but culture is perhaps the one important aspect of a company where failed experiments hurt. — Eric Schmidt

Although he was a young and virile man at 37, he was not inexhaustible. In addition to food and drink, he had better lay in a couple thousand tablets of viagra. The drug would probably remain potent if he vacuum packed the pills in groups of 10 and kept them in a freezer. That would work unless civilization completely collapsed and power companies were unable to function. Fortunately, Jim had a propane-powered backup generator with half a dozen tanks of fuel already on hand. If Henry added to the propane supply, and he used the generator only for essential maintenance like keeping the viagra freezer operating in warm weather, he would be happy here on the farm for a looong, looong time. Unless, even now, dead Jim was out there in the generator shed sabotaging the machinery. — Dean Koontz

China's economy became more complex. By now there is a large number of small- and medium-sized companies that work quite differently from big, state-owned enterprises. They don't follow any long-term business plan and don't rent office space for years to come. They start out and need an office right away, for a week, a month or half a year, and they want to be among other entrepreneurs like themselves. — Zhang Xin

I got a couple of different contacts from publishing companies saying they'd be interested in a book about my work: not a kiss-and-tell book, which I specifically put in the contract. Just a book about my work and what I did. — Linda Ronstadt

My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company. — Larry Page

I think doctors are really suffering now. They're suffering in the sense that they feel torn between serving their patients in the best way they can and dealing with all of requirements of the insurance companies and the HMOs and the hassles and the paper work and the increasing pressures to do less and less for their patients. — Marcia Angell

everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you are competing against a lot of people. But if you are willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you are now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five — Gerardo Giannoni

I think in most companies you're surrounded by the past. You may have a Web site or archives or a lobby that sort of shows off your work of the past. The future is not as tangible. — Harry West

Our first priority should be the people who work for the companies, then the customers, then the shareholders. Because if the staff are motivated then the customers will be happy, and the shareholders will then benefit through the company's success. — Richard Branson

The 'find it, fix it 'model of medicine doesn't work any more. The U.S. healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff. And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Is it possible to run a big industrial corporation in a benevolent fashion? We see these days that even the hippest companies hide some rotten practices to make their profit margins work. — Ann Nocenti

Many companies operate from more of a command-and-control environment - they decide what's going to happen at headquarters and have the organization execute. That doesn't work here because it's the community of users who really have control.

So we enable, not direct. We think of our customers as people, not wallets. And that has implications for how we run the company. We partner with our customers and let them take the company where they think it's best utilized. — Meg Whitman

Recessions are the best time to start a company. Companies fail. Others hold back capital. If you are willing to do the preparation and work, it is the best time to invest in yourself and start a business. — Mark Cuban

America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth. — Michael Martin Hammer

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated. — Warren Buffett

As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the priorities they have learned to accept, and the ways of doing things and methods of making decisions that they have employed so successfully, are the right way to work. Once members of the organization begin to adopt ways of working and criteria for making decisions by assumption, rather than by conscious decision, then those processes and values come to constitute the organization's culture. 7 As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how it should be done so that the right jobs are done repeatedly and consistently can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in these situations. Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently. Hence, the location of the — Clayton M Christensen

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art. — Bill Gates

I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. — James Hillman

History suggests that attempts to privatize Medicare by relying on private companies to offer Medicare benefits in rural America simply will not work. — Bennie Thompson

Classically, cosmetics companies will take highly theoretical, textbookish information about the way that cells work - the components at a molecular level or the behavior of cells in a glass dish - and then pretend it's the same as the ultimate issue of whether something makes you look nice. "This molecular component," they say, with a flourish, "is crucial for collagen formation." And that will be perfectly true (along with many other amino acids which are used by your body to assemble protein in joints, skin, and everywhere else), but there is no reason to believe that anyone is deficient in it or that smearing it on your face will make any difference to your appearance. In general, you don't absorb things very well through your skin, because its purpose is to be relatively impermeable. When you sit in a bath of baked beans for charity, you do not get fat, nor do you start farting. — Ben Goldacre

I am fascinated to hear of the impact that ESOPs have had on work-force morale in corporations of all sizes such as Sears Roebuck, Potomac Electric Power, Lowe's Companies and the Dow Chemical Company. — Robert S. Strauss

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families
only to find that by then their families were gone. — Larissa MacFarquhar