Creative Business Quotes & Sayings

I'm convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that's right ... People don't succeed by migrating to a "hot" industry (one word: dotcom) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra (remember "horizontal careers"?). They thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are
and connecting that to work that they truly love (and, in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined). — Po Bronson

I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson. I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way. — Mick Jagger

Learn to use your brain power. Critical thinking is the key to creative problem solving in business. — Richard Branson

There is no room for being creative in today's business ... Except for finding creative ways to be inefficient. — Martin Wolf

I've got a feeling I'm leaving stardom behind, you know. I'm gradually becoming more of a filmmaker, acquiring a different kind of dignity from that which you achieve in acting. After all, I'm no matinee idol, and I'm getting older. I don't think I can be doing my kind of thing in the seventies; I want to be on more of the creative side of business. — Steve McQueen

Innovation takes practice more than talent. — Debra Kaye

The corporate system is fully psychopathic, and any creative people who enter into business with any of these organizations come up against a lifetime of issues. You just deal with it as you go along. It'll keep on happening until people reorganize the organizations. — Kevin Shields

Entrepreneurship is when an individual retrieves a red hot idea from the creativity furnace without the constraint of the heat of lean resources, and with each persistent blow of the innovation hammer shapes the still malleable idea against the anvil of passion, vision, insight, strategy, and principles to forge a fitting vessel of a creative concern. — Amah Lambert

One big lesson I learned from movie [making] was I don't do creative projects that I headline unless I have all the control. I can't deal with having to live with other people's screw ups, and that's just sort of the way the movie business works. The people with the money are in charge. Until I'm in charge, I don't want to play that game. — Tucker Max

Without ... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace. — E.F. Schumacher

Some people want fame, popularity and huge sales. I've always hoped to have a really long career. So I've tried to make each of my creative decisions and business decisions to allow for longevity. As a side effect I got really famous and really big. I didn't realize the two could go together. — Jewel

I really respect the Coen brothers as directors and as creative individuals and with the way that they handle the industry and the business side of things. — Allison Tolman

I think it would be a good thing in the creative community if there was less embarrassment of this word 'commercial' because that's how you make a business. — Eric Fellner

I think it's become much harder because I'm more afraid of every step I take. I'm more aware of its ramifications, I'm more aware of the less creative aspects of music - like the business-side of things for example. — Zach Condon

The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. — Linus Pauling

Saxon and I had no business even attempting any type of relationship with each other. We were gunpowder and one hell of a spark, and I wasn't about to test our combustibility. — Liz Reinhardt

[E]conomic liberty and creative entrepreneurship are the basis of any solution to today's social and economic difficulties. Blaming business, setting wages, and attempting to run the economy by decree from Washington only exacerbates the problems. Consider the minimum wage. It seems so simple: Tell business to pay its workers more. But a hike in the minimum wage is essentially a tax, punishing precisely those companies that hire workers with the least skills. — Doug Bandow

I'm not very good at business. I'm more of a creative, fun-loving hippie type. — Rebecca Ferguson

Everyone in my family is in the film business; I knew I wanted to be creative and it was important in my family to be artistic. — Sofia Coppola

One of the most inventive forms of creative capitalism involves someone we all know very well. A few years ago, I was sitting in a bar here in Davos with Bono. Late at night, after a few drinks, he was on fire, talking about how we could get a percentage of each purchase from civic-minded companies to help change the world. He kept calling people, waking them up, and handing me the phone to show me the interest. — Bill Gates

Applying creative thinking to our clients' business strategy-this should be our industry's new core competency. And-in what is very good news for our industry-this kind of creativity, creativity that goes to the heart of business, is more in-demand than ever. — Bob Schmetterer

Building a business is a creative act. Few of us realize when we start out that we are creating not only a company but a culture. That's because it's usually not planned. It just happens. While everyone is focused on something else, making sales, providing service, sending out invoices, a little community springs up. It has its own unspoken customs, traditions, modes of dress and speech, and rules of behavior. By the time you become aware of it, the culture is often well established and it will probably be a reflection of your personality. — Jack Daly

Jerry Hirshberg, in his book The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business, writes, No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent "long-range" vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine. People in groups regress toward the security of the familiar and the well-regulated. Even creative people do it. It's easier. It avoids the ambiguity, the fear of unpredictability, the threat of the unfamiliar, and the messiness of intuition and human emotion. — John C. Maxwell

Companies that recognize the need to be creative about their businesses are going to pursue this creative thinking with us or without us. It's our collective responsibility, our collective future to make sure they choose to do it with us. — Bob Schmetterer

The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked. — David Ogilvy

People that I have known that have been extremely creative, people in the business, they have always been influenced by their mothers. Their mothers are the ones that created whatever it is - the urge to create. — Georgia Holt

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon's founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old "gatekeepers" of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. "Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation," Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. "When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there's no expert gatekeeper ready to say 'that will never work!' And guess what - many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity. — Brad Stone

Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business. — Leo Burnett

Music business is not for everyone. But if you have it in you, you have that passion, if you have that energy in you that you really want to make something creative and make something that's going to impact the world, then go for it, do it and don't let anybody tell you no. — John Legend

One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. " I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company," he recalled." The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. When i got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I would be useless without the company, and that's why I decided to stay and rebuild it. — Walter Isaacson

I find, in merchandising and design and creative, a business school degree isn't particularly helpful. — Mickey Drexler

Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do. — Steve Jobs

Look for patterns, and then ask why those patterns exist. — Debra Kaye

We've all been in positions where we felt out of place or not accepted for whatever reason. For me, that's been my life. I've always been that person that stood out. And what makes you an outcast is what makes you unique, and you should harness that. Being a black sheep gives you creative license to do sh*t differently. — Andre Hueston Mack

In this age when people expect to get their music for free, we have to work out how we can protect the rights of creative artists so they are compensated fairly and that the record business itself remains sound and healthy. — Clive Davis

The truth is an artist like me who doesn't get the type of promotion that we see more commercial artists receive, and especially in this climate of the music business, you have to be creative about how you promote yourself. — Chrisette Michele

Most corporations fail to tolerate the creative fanatic who has been the driving force behind most major innovations. Innovations, being far removed from the mainstream of the business, show little promise in the early stages of development. Moreover, the champion is obnoxious, impatient, egotistic, and perhaps a bit irrational in organizational terms. As a consequence, he is not hired. If hired, he is not promoted or rewarded. He is regarded as "not a serious person," "embarrassing," or — Tom Peters

From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we'd be out of business. If it weren't protected, there'd be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there's a simpler reason: It's wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character. — Walter Isaacson

I enjoy the creative side of the business side of being a restaurateur. That's my thing. The thing I'm constantly thinking about is, how do you create new, interesting situations that keep people coming back? — Todd English

Unfortunately, music devolved instead of evolved. The music business got into the hands of lawyers and accountants rather than the entrepreneurial creative people, and that's when the beginning of the end started. It's all based on money instead of art and creativity. — Gary Wright

Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology. — Walter Isaacson

Here's what I like about God: Trees are crooked, mountains are lumpy, a lot of his creatures are funny-looking, and he made it all anyway. He didn't let the aardvark convince him he had no business designing creatures. He didn't make a puffer fish and get discouraged. No, the maker made things - and still does. European film directors often enjoy creative careers, during which their films mature from the manifestos of angry young men to the rueful wisdom of great works by creative masters. Is an afternoon siesta the secret? Is their vita just a little more dolce? We've taken espresso to our American hearts, but we haven't quite taken to the "break" in our coffee breaks. Worried about playing the fool, we forget how to simply play. We try to make our creativity linear and goal oriented. We want our "work" to lead somewhere. We forget that diversions do more than merely divert us. — Julia Cameron

I talked with people starting up in the middle of the recession and employees, and supplies and office space were cheap. As far as companies that are already in existence, many became more creative with how they spent their money. A lot of them stopped wasting money that they didn't know they were wasting after they looked hard at their businesses. Some had to change business models because of the economy. Their market didn't exist or wasn't as big anymore. — JJ Ramberg

When each of these three elements of vision-concern for excellence, for people and for the wider environment-are present, business is transformed from a tool for making profits into a creative, humane experiment for improving life. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The bigger the budget, the more you can afford to compromise with Mother Nature. The smaller the budget, the more you're like, "Okay, well, we have to do this, but how can we afford to do it." That's when you have to get really creative on the business side, as far as making compromises. — Thomas Ian Nicholas

What if all the forces of society were bent upon developing [poor] children? What if society's business were making people insteadof profits? How much of their creative beauty of spirit would remain unquenched through the years? How much of this responsiveness would follow them through life? — Mary Heaton Vorse

I believe that independent film making is the last frontier of creative expression available. So I'm always willing to lend a helping hand to a young film maker who's just getting into the business. — Lloyd Kaufman

The evidence seems clear that those business which actively serve their many constitutencies in creative, morally thoughtful ways also, over the long run, serve their shareholders best. Companies do, infact, do well by doing good. — Norman Lear

Friends don't necessarily made good business or creative partners. — Joseph Barbera

Creative people don't behave very well generally. If you're looking for examples of good relationships in show business, you're gonna be depressed real fast. I don't have time for anything else right now but work and my daughter. She's my first priority. — Jim Carrey

The creative process is a very collaborative process. I know it might seem that way because so much ink is spilled and the media is obsessed with business and numbers and studios ... but filmmakers don't think of it that way. We just go off and we tell our stories. It's the same torture that we adore, it's the same torture that our forefathers endured making movies in the golden era of Hollywood. So, from my perspective it's no different, I'm sure, from the men and women who I admire so much who made the earliest movies. — Steven Spielberg

I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive then I believe you are better off not doing it. A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts. — Richard Branson

I've never been good in the financial and business arenas. I handle the creative side of things. — Daryl Hannah

I started my career as a journalist, writing about science and technology for 'Business Week' magazine. Then I decided to make a career shift. I went to graduate school in computer science, and I began developing educational technologies - in particular, technologies to engage children in creative learning experiences. — Mitchel Resnick

In every aspect of society, including business and anywhere that creativity can be used, we can be - or we used to be, anyway - the most innovative country, because we weren't restricted by artificial limitations. We are made to be wild, free, and creative, and this clearly was a symbol of that kind of energy in America. — Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

All too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.
[2002] p.46 — Gary Hamel

Creative business seminar. Basically a quick, impromptu brainwashing course to educate your typical corporate warriors. They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. No transcendent elements like in a religion, though, and everything is theorized and digitalized. Very transparent and easy to grasp. And quite a few people get positive encouragement from this. But the fact remains that it's nothing more than an infusion of the hypnotic into a system of thought that suits their goal, a conglomeration of only those theories and statistics that line up with their ultimate objectives. — Haruki Murakami

Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4.5 years, which is, well, a fairly spectacular rise. — Bryce Courtenay

As much as I'd only like to concentrate on the creative side of acting, the whole business in general is just that - a business - and you have to do your homework if you want to be successful. — Margot Robbie

What you wear for work should be comfortable and empowering. If you're working in business, your outfit should mean business. If I go to meet somebody about an acting job, or something creative, then I'll be in my jeans. For me, overdressing is my biggest fear. — Twiggy

Technically my boss, Laynie's most notable trait was her ability to focus intently on a project until it was completed. In other words, she was a little obsessive. It was actually a great characteristic when it came to work. She always thought of everything, never missing a detail. Her brain worked on overdrive, and while she liked to talk incessantly about business, her passion and creative ideas made sure the subject never grew old. — Laurelin Paige

When I see our country's stagnation and economic woes, I cannot help but think that we need a creative revolution that is embraced by business and endorsed by government and educators alike. — Larry R. Thompson

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. — Anthony Jay

Ms. Ellie Bockert Augsburger, owner of Creative Digital Studios, did a most excellent job. I feel compelled to mention that she had great ideas for Storm Warning. When asked to switch, she did so with ease, for this and many other reasons, I highly recommend her. In addition to cover art, she does graphic designs for businesses. She did a silhouette of an eagle similar to the one on Call Sign: Wrecking Crew (Wings of Eagles) for our business logo. — Lynn Hallbrooks

If everyone waited to become an expert before starting, no one would become an expert. To become an EXPERT, you must have EXPERIENCE. To get EXPERIENCE, you must EXPERIMENT! Stop waiting. Start stuff. — Richie Norton

All the world's a stage. Creative work is a kind of theater. The stage is your studio, your desk, or your workstation. The costume is your outfit - your painting pants, your business suit, or that funny hat that helps you think. The props are your materials, your tools, and your medium. The script is just plain old time. An hour here, or an hour there - just time measured out for things to happen. — Austin Kleon

Generally I'm wide open to people; I love helping them in any way I possibly can. But for me to invest, a business has to have a lot of creative scale; it has to be unique. — J. Christopher Burch

Let people have their opinions. More than that
let people love their opinions, just as you and I are in love with ours. But never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else's blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work. And always remember that people's judgments about you are none of your business. — Elizabeth Gilbert

As I visualize it, the business of the future will be a scientific, social and economic unit. It will be vigorously creative in pure science where its contributions will compare with those of the universities. — Edwin Land

My best ideas come in the shower, where I'm showered with water, but also ideas. — Ryan Lilly

Be creative. Innovate consistently on the little things that the big companies ignore. Little things often make big differences in business. — Richard Branson

Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing. — David Knopfler

To put it another way, I believe that purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs. — Dee Hock

I like that combination between creativity and the creative process and the organization needed to make a business like this successful worldwide. — Bernard Arnault

Bootstrapping allows you total creative freedom. For example, if you decide to approach your business in a certain way that makes it a two- or three-year process to get to your first product, you can do that, versus being rushed into it by investors. — Nick Woodman

I've now returned to the business again because I finally realised that I really enjoy the creative process. — Gil Gerard

For me it's much more like a little kid rebelling. The minute I was told what to do at any age, I did the opposite. Hopefully I'll do that for the rest of my life. I come from the business side and Mark comes from the creative side, but every time a decision came up about Creep it was two emails, and we agreed. I've not had that ever with someone on the creative or the business side. — Jason Blum

The irreducible, ultimate element in religious faith is the insistence that we are created things; male and female He created them; without God we are nothing. And yet, when men and women have children and become parents, they unmistakably become creators, incompetent, accidental and partial creators, no doubt, but creators none the less. It is their inescapable duty, and, with luck, their occasional delight to care and watch over their creations; even if this creative power is partly illusory because chromosomes and chance decide the whole business, parents cannot act as if it is illusory; they cannot sincerely believe in their ultimate helplessness. They must behave like shepherds, however clumsy, and not like sheep, however well trained.
The Sermon on the Mount is a wonderful, intoxicating sermon. But it is a sermon for bachelors. — Ferdinand Mount

It's a funny line when you're walking - the creativity, the subjectivity versus the objectivity, creativity versus the business, and recognizing that you are in the music business, so there are certain things that you have to acquiesce to on the business side and certain creative decisions that you have to make for the purposes of serving the business side of it. — Lupe Fiasco

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much. — Steve Jobs

When I was bartering to gain clients, I was self-sabotaging my business. I wasn't making money, and the promised "exchange of advertising" wasn't helping to grow my business. — Kim Beasley

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. — Virginia Woolf

Emotion. Passion. Ideas. Simplicity. These are the big things that big business needs from its creative agencies. No one else is going to provide these essential elements for business. — Kevin Roberts

In our business, except in media buying, there are few economies of scale. Client perception of creative agencies is that the bigger they are, the worse they are. — Martin Sorrell

We are all creative, from the mother adding an extra pinch of garlic to her meal, to the entrepreneur launching a brand new product, to the business consultant who creates a more effective way for corporate departments to communicate. The call requires creativity. — Shannon Tanner

If you run a business, 80% of your business probably comes from 20% of your customers. If you are a creative person, 80% of your awards/recognition/income will come from 20% of your output. — David Hieatt

There's an eternal war between a creative person and the business person. — Jerry Della Femina

The secret of the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We're all in the dirty laundry business and we're being paid to take risks and look silly. Race car drivers get paid to risk their lives in a more concrete way; we get paid to risk our lives in an emotional way. — Paul Schrader

Let a person only approach his or her own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free ... The creative spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate. — D.H. Lawrence

In a creative business, if you're happy, it will come out in your work. I don't see how you can be happy if you don't like the people you're working with and if they aren't a joy to have fun with. — Christian Louboutin

I faced people from all walks of business who fully disregarded design (though they were completely influenced by it). I also met fine artists who drowned in their own work and the dense creative universe in their minds.

Then I met designers. And instantly fell in love. Let me tell you why.

Designers are familiar with critiques. They not only tolerate them but actively look out for them. They honestly believe in iterations and learn to edit down their work. They embrace simplicity and create beauty based on requirements other than their own. Design education teaches you to run away from assumptions and to have the stomach to scrap your work often.

I'm bringing this up because it's time to bridge the gap between design and business. — Laura Busche

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law ... . They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission. - Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters, 2002 — Naomi Klein

On Positive Liberty: The business of the State is to use its organizing powers for the purpose of furnishing the necessary conditions which allow this people freely to unfold its creative faculties. — Adolf Hitler

Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. — Justine Musk

To be creative, an idea must also be appropriate - useful and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done by improving a product, for instance, or by opening up a new way to approach a process. — Teresa Amabile

Find three hobbies you love: one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one to be creative. — Anonymous

When you have a creative business and ideas generated from people working together, I think you can work happier together. — Diane Nelson

Use your profession to fund your passion. — Habeeb Akande

My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative. — Bob Balaban

I'm born into the cycle of giving that we're all born into, and I recognize it. So just because something is a good business, I'm not a business guy. I'm a creative guy. — Russell Simmons