Business Enterprise Quotes & Sayings

We are seeing some challenges and some changes in American business, American enterprise, but the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is a reminder of things that must never change: the passion for excellence, the drive to innovate, the hard work that goes with any successful enterprise. — George W. Bush

I am yet to meet the idiot at whose door success arrived as a direct result of his refusal to invest in the enterprise that made him rich. — Jonathan Wutawunashe

As the owner of the Arison Group, a philanthropic and business enterprise that spans across 40 countries in 5 continents, my ongoing challenge is to bridge the gap between what I envision and its understanding and practical implementation. The Arison Group operates to realize the overall vision of Doing Good. — Shari Arison

For a long time, to obtain enterprise customers, I concealed the fact that I owned the company. I never lied about it, but I never volunteered that information. My business card didn't even have a title — Rebecca Enonchong

Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the
chief sources of danger ... Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy. — Milton Friedman

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business. — Barbara Ehrenreich

At any rate, planning in this sense means all-around planning by the government and enforcement of these plans by the police power. Planning in this sense means full government control of business. It is the antithesis of free enterprise, private initiative, private ownership of the means of production, market economy, and the price system. Planning and capitalism are ut- terly incompatible. Within a system of planning production is conducted according to the government's orders, not according to the plans of capitalists and entrepreneurs eager to profit by best filling the wants of the consumers. — Ludwig Von Mises

Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society. — Peter Drucker

Governments must take on the central role of creating an investment climate across Africa that supports enterprise and the role of the private sector and provides a clear and predictable economic policy framework for business to succeed. — Jeroen Van Der Veer

Unhappy is the fate of one who tries to win his battles and succeed in his attacks without cultivating the spirit of enterprise; for the result is waste of time and general stagnation. — Sun Tzu

We very much hope that as we get growth that we can reduce the burden of taxation, that we can reduce income tax and increase the amount of genuine free enterprise and business enterprise ... This is going ... toward the restoration of the personal responsibility, the independence, with every man a property owner, every man a capitalist. — Margaret Thatcher

There is some confusion because we only recently began our marketing. We're in an era were people need to think about business processes and applications horizontally ... We need to think of the enterprise not as an island of stand-alone technology. — Carly Fiorina

Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street
a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American. — Roger Lowenstein

Defining your enterprise business capability is part art and part science, and building your business capabilities is more science than art. — Pearl Zhu

In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system. — Michael Parenti

I'm not pro-business. I'm pro-free enterprise. — Jeb Hensarling

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it. — George Lois

Summer, with its dog days, its vacations, its distractions, is over. We have had our holidays, our rest, our recreation. The fall season, with its new opportunities for effort, enterprise and achievement, is upon us. Let us rip off our coats and get down to business. We may have allowed pessimism to grip us during the summer months. We may even have allowed laziness to enter our bones. Now it is up to us to throw off both lassitude and pessimism. The time has come for action, for aggressiveness ... — B.C. Forbes

I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders. — Robert Green Ingersoll

For the existing enterprise, whether business or public-service institution, the controlling word in the term 'entrepreneurial management' is 'entrepreneurial'. For the new venture, it is 'management'. In the existing business, it is the existing that is the main obstacle to entrepreneurship. In the new venture, it is its absence. The new venture has an idea. It may have a product or a service. It may even have sales, and sometimes quite a substantial volume of them. It surely has costs. And it may have revenues and even profits. What it does not have is a 'business', a viable, operating, organized 'present' in which people know where they are going, what they are supposed to do, and what the results are or should be. But unless a new venture develops into a new business and makes sure of being 'managed', it will not survive no matter how brilliant the entrepreneurial idea, how much money it attracts, how good its products, nor even how great the demand for them. — Peter F. Drucker

The business of procuring the necessities of life has been shifted from the wood lot, the garden, the kitchen and the family to the factory and the large-scale enterprise. In our case, we moved our center back to the land. — Helen Nearing

The ability of individuals to extract wealth from society by profiting from land also leads to cultural degeneration and a loss of social cohesion over time... In general, as the value of land increases, the return on capital tends to decrease comparatively, which discourages business owners from investing in capital goods and private enterprise... Resources flow away from endeavours that can create jobs, produce wealth, and enliven society, and instead flow into land speculation. — Martin Adams

So many of the major decisions that affect the entire future of your enterprise happen during its first year in business. In fact, most don't make it because they don't know how to get the resources they need to survive. — Jay Samit

The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor. — E.B. White

Databases There are three types of databases in Dynamics AX and are explained as follows: Business database: This is the transaction database for Dynamics AX. Model database: This database stores the application elements. These elements include standard code and customizations. Other databases: These are the content and configuration database for SharePoint, Enterprise search databases, reporting services, and analysis services (OLAP cubes) databases for Business Intelligence (BI) and reporting. — Yogesh Kasat

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a "sustainable pace"? And second, how could I successfully scale adoption of an Agile approach across an enterprise and overcome the inevitable resistance to change? — David J. Anderson

Managers are the basic and scarcest resource of any business enterprise. — Peter Drucker

The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise. — Milton Friedman

Customer conversion is dependent on the right customer conversation — Rasheed Ogunlaru

The representatives of business interests are the men to start this enterprise among our people and bring them to a full realization of the very grave seriousness of this war, to make them feel that we are in this war to win, and the probability is that our entering this war is going to be the deciding factor, and that the burden of the success is going to rest upon the United States. — John J. Pershing

Every corporate security may be best viewed, in the first instance, as an ownership interest in, or a claim against, a specific business enterprise. — Benjamin Graham

Success in the long run has less to do with finding the best idea, organizational structure, or business model for an enterprise, than with discovering what matters to us as individuals. — Jerry I. Porras

A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon. — Edward Abbey

In the foundation and development of a successful enterprise there must be a single-minded pursuit of financial profit. — C. Northcote Parkinson

Our success at friendship, business, sports, love
indeed, at nearly every enterprise we attempt
is largely determined by our self-image. People who have a confidence in their personal worth seem to be magnets for success and happiness. — Alan Loy McGinnis

Ever since 1945 the federal government has held and indeed increased its importance as the first customer of the American economy. Government spending had been the primary economic stimulant and to increase it had been the goal of hundreds of interest groups; hopes of balanced budgets and cheap, business-like administration always ran aground upon this fact. What was more, the United States was a democracy; whatever the doctrinaire objections to it, and however much rhetoric might be devoted to attacking it, a welfare state slowly advanced because voters wanted it that way. These facts gradually made the old ideal of totally free enterprise, unchecked and uninvaded by the influence of government, unreal. — J.M. Roberts

Today's partners can be your competitors tomorrow. And today's competitors can be your partners tomorrow. — Suzy Kassem

The [liberals] consider profits as objectionable. The very existence of profits is in their eyes a proof that wage rates could be raised without harm to anybody. They speak of profit without dealing with loss. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities. A profitable enterprise tends to expand; an unprofitable one tends to shrink. The elimination of profit renders production rigid and abolishes the consumer's control. — Ludwig Von Mises

Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. — Ronald Reagan

Republican Party is the party that stands for the people who are trying to start a business out of the spare bedroom of their home, who are trying to give their kids a better life. And the only way that's possible is through the America free enterprise system. — Marco Rubio

The left's obsession with corporations as a spawn of evil is pathological paranoia. A corporation is just one form of organizing a private business enterprise for purposes of limiting personal liability, issuing stock, filing financial reports and paying taxes. Other forms include partnerships and sole proprietorships. Are they less evil? You buy your groceries from corporations, your cars, newspapers, cellphones, clothing and exercise equipment. Your parents and children work for corporations. Are they evil? — Mike Rosen

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon. — Winston Churchill

In business, I believe that if you focus only on the journey, you'll miss the whole point of the enterprise. There has to be a goal, an end game of some kind; otherwise, you're just spinning your wheels. Yes, the journey is important, but the destination is important, too. — Ivanka Trump

This is about putting education absolutely in the centre of enterprise and then using the traditions of Birmingham to inspire and grow. If you have knowledge and business linked together you will grow well, you go further down the innovative path and actually you create more and more jobs. Those jobs will only be available for people with skills but they will be real sustainable employments. That is how important innovation is. — Digby Jones, Baron Jones Of Birmingham

Barack Obama doesn't believe in free enterprise. He's never going to admit it. For instance, he's never going to come straight out and say, 'If you own a business you didn't build it.' Alright, maybe he will. — Marco Rubio

We think of enterprise architecture as the process we use for fully describing and mapping business functionality and business requirements and relating them to information systems requirements. — Tony Scott

The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it. — Aaron Levie

The enterprise can fulfill its human and social functions only if it prospers as a business. — Peter Drucker

Bribery quickly became an integral part of the Russian way of doing business, and the expense of buying a government official was considered the most important part of a new enterprise's starting capital. — David Satter

The foundational stone for any business, enterprise or project has to be wisdom. — Sunday Adelaja

For my part, I rather distrust men or concerns that rise up with the speed of rockets. Sudden rises are sometimes followed by equally sudden falls. I have most faith in the individual or enterprise that advances step by step. A mushroom can spring up in a day; an oak takes 50 years or more to reach maturity. Mushrooms don't last; oaks do. The real cause for an enormous number of business failures is premature over-expansion, attempting to gallop before learning to creep. Sudden successes often invite sudden reverses. — B.C. Forbes

You must distinguish sharply between being pro free enterprise and being pro business. — Milton Friedman

They were members of Maine's very small money class. Their business, as they ridiculously called it, didn't make a cent, but they didn't need to make money; they were born rich. Their needless enterprise consisted of taking people to the wilderness and creating for them the sensation that they were lost there; they also took people shooting down rapids in frail rafts or canoes, creating for them the sensation that they would surely be bashed to death before they drowned. — John Irving

Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page. — Steven Pressfield

Success in an enterprise can be brought about, through effective leadership, which educes open communication, which in turn would contribute towards bringing down conflict levels, thus leading to higher productivity and distinguished gains, which in turn testifies about the healthy corporate culture of an organization. — Henrietta Newton Martin

Any business or enterprise that shaves away loneliness is going to last forever. And like it or not but we've got a lonely society. — Anita Roddick

When you delve deep enough, you find that practically every great fortune and great enterprise in America have sprung from the courageous enterprise of some individual. It was Commodore Vanderbilt's enterprise in switching first from running a ferryboat to running other ships, and then, when he was well along in years, his enterprise in switching into railroading, that created what was to become one of the most notable fortunes in the history of the world. — B.C. Forbes

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise. — Mitt Romney

Ignorance and arrogance are the artist's and entrepreneur's indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no
idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. — Steven Pressfield

Social embedded business processes that solve concrete needs are key to enterprise social collaboration. — Marc Benioff

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. — Dave Eggers

The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on. — Albert J. Nock

A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society. — Peter Drucker

I believe that today's businesses - regardless of their size - must be prepared to do good in societies around the globe. I am cautiously optimistic that we can make the world a far better, safer and more equitable place - but business and enterprise must sit at the heart of this process. — Richard Branson

I always just wanted to have enough to carry on. I never had ambitions to take over the world or be a global enterprise. But I wanted to have a strong business in order to do the main objective. — Rei Kawakubo

Anyone who critically analyzes a business learns this: that the success or failure of an enterprise depends usually upon one man. — Louis D. Brandeis

An entrepreneurial spirit makes you someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business enterprise, talent or calling to become an agent of change. — Archibald Marwizi

More material progress has been made during the past one hundred and fifty years under the American system of business enterprise than during all the preceding centuries in world history. This record of achievement is a challenge to those who would radically change that system. — Karl Taylor Compton

The story of Reginald Watts was a luckless one dealing in every manner of failure and catastrophe, though he spoke of this without bitterness or regret, and in fact seemed to find humor in his numberless missteps: 'I've failed at straight business, I've failed at criminal enterprise, I've failed at love, I've failed at friendship. You name it, I've failed at it. Go ahead and name something. Anything at all. — Patrick DeWitt

EROEI [energy returned on energy invested, or net energy] is to a civilization what gross profit is to a business, the source of the surplus that supports the entire enterprise. — John Michael Greer

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking "The Dodge Rebellion"? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with "Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules"? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It's almost a history lesson: I'm starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans' biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It'd be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting. — David Foster Wallace

The process of sanctifying life could thus almost take on the character of a business enterprise. — Max Weber

It was not for nothing that Adam Smith wrote that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." The romantic notion of politics holds that Big Business is synonymous with capitalism and the archenemy of socialism. In fact, Big Business is reliably against most of what must go into any modern definition of capitalism: free trade, free enterprise, free markets, and the impartial rule of law. Big Business reliably seeks to use the state to seek advantages in trade and to crush smaller (and often more innovative) competitors. — Kevin D. Williamson

[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. — Arundhati Roy

Organized business has assumed that greater profits would be pretty much of a cure-all, and it has to a major extent ignored the fact that the welfare of business rests upon the welfare of the consumers of a nation; that business or free enterprise will function in a democracy only so long as the democracy functions. — Saul Alinsky

Banks operate like a man who either wears his trousers round his chest, stifling breathing, as now, or round his ankles, exposing his assets. We want their trousers tied round their middle: steady lending growth; particularly to productive British business, especially small scale enterprise. — Vince Cable

Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise. — Peter L. Bergen

Business is a human enterprise, driven and determined by people. — Keith Ferrazzi

Business isn't some disembodied bloodless enterprise. Profit is fine - a sign that the customer honors the value of what we do. But "enterprise" ( a lovely word ) is about heart. About beauty. It's about art. About people throwing themselves on the line. It's about passion and the selfless pursuit of an ideal. — Tom Peters

The U.S. government uses cash accounting. That is illegal for any enterprise of any size in America except for the U.S. government. Every for-profit business, every not-for-profit business, every state and local government has to use real accounting except for Uncle Sam. — Jim Cooper

A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate. — G.K. Chesterton

Beware of that profound enemy of the free enterprise system who pays lip-service to free competition, but also labels every antitrust prosecution as a persecution. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Yes, the disruption of the Internet can be blamed for the destruction of the business model that once made journalism a thriving, well-paying enterprise, but it has also created an array of new tools for reporting. Somebody will eventually figure out how to make online newspapers profitable - I hope. — David Horsey

Such terms as 'diagnosis' and 'pathology' are of course used analogically here, but I am using the word 'science' deliberate and unequivocally in its original and broad sense of discovery and knowing, rather than its conventional sense of isolating the secondary causes of natural phenomena. For if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad; a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong. — Walker Percy

If you aren't building a social enterprise, I don't know what your business model will be in 5 years — Angela Ahrendts

Americans chose a free enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home. — Marco Rubio

You know that great prejudice exists against all successful business enterprise - the more successful, the greater the prejudice. — John D. Rockefeller

I think I'm basically a liberal Conservative - I believe in low tax, spirit of free enterprise, and in making sure that we as politicians create the framework for business to produce the dosh that we're going to need to pay for the poorest. And the longer I live, the more I think that we all have a duty to each other. — Boris Johnson

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner's job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one's own property. — Peter F. Drucker

It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of this enterprise makes you wonder about the sanity of our species. But consider: When millers mill wheat, they scrupulously sheer off the most nutritious parts of the seed - the coat of bran and the embryo, or germ, that it protects - and sell that off, retaining the least nourishing part to feed us. In effect, they're throwing away the best 25 percent of the seed: The vitamins and antioxidants, most of the minerals, and the healthy oils all go to factory farms to feed animals, or to the pharmaceutical industry, which recovers some of the vitamins from the germ and then sells them back to us - to help remedy nutritional deficiencies created at least in part by white flour. A terrific business model, perhaps, but terrible biology. Surely — Michael Pollan

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs. — Peter Drucker

The accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that serve the dominant economic interest ... What economists believe and teach, whether in the United States or in the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions - the private business enterprise, the Communist Party - that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed. — John Kenneth Galbraith

And I say that Your Highnesses ought not to consent that any foreigner does business or sets foot here, except Christian Catholics since this was the end and the beginning of the enterprise, that it should be for the enhancement and glory of the Christian religion, nor should anyone who is not a good Christian come to these parts. Here may be found the first suggestion of the exclusive colonial policy that Spain and other nations followed. — Christopher Columbus

The virtues of free enterprise can become distorted by greed & delusion. — Allan Lokos

I thought there was an abundance of information on how to structure a business, but there was a shortage of concrete information on what it really takes to sustain a business. The more I would hear from the experts on how to start a business, the less it rang true for me and my personal experience of running a small enterprise. — Paul E. Casey

Most companies want free enterprise in general because that produces better goods and services and makes people's lives better, but they don't want it in their business. They want protection from competition, they want subsidies, they want the government to pick winners and losers, and they want to be picked as winners, and that's what we're opposing, and that's what drives my whole efforts in policy, and in the political arena. — Charles Koch

Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people to find, use and share critical business information quickly. — Jeff Raikes

3. The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business cannot extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit. Well-conducted business enterprise cannot fail to return a profit, but profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It cannot be the basis - it must be the result of service. — Henry Ford

The Hollywood left insists on painting business persons as arch criminals, even though it's ridiculous. They like to depict free enterprise, capitalism and business leaders as a source of evil and criminality. Somehow they think that will influence enough people to further their left-wing agenda. — James Cook