Failure Business Quotes & Sayings

In our business, things look like a failure until they're not. It's pretty binary transitions. — Satya Nadella

You're saying she doesn't do her work? So take care of your business! Fail her like a normal kid. The failure will be between me and my daughter, then. You won't like it if her failure is between me and you. — Esme Raji Codell

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. — Bill Bryson

Contrary to popular belief, I consider failure a necessity in business. If you're not failing at least five times a day, you're probably not doing enough. The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get. The operative word here is learn. If you repeat the same mistake two or three times, you are not learning from it. You must learn from your own mistakes and from the mistakes of others before you.4 — John C. Maxwell

Most employees want to be involved in a successful business and most employees are happy for people running successful businesses to be paid a reasonable wage and a market rate for it, provided they understand the reason. What they hate most of all is pay for failure. — Stuart Rose

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These are the lessons for today, try to put them in your bag and start using them one by one! — Deyth Banger

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again. — Richard Branson

Surviving a failure gives you more self-confidence. Failures are great learning tools.. but they must be kept to a minimum. — Jeffrey R. Immelt

Television is ultimately a business of failure. You try a lot of things, and most of it fails. — Greg Berlanti

Could many of our ills today have resulted from our failure to train a strong citizenry from the only source we have - the boys and girls of each community? Have they grown up to believe in politics without principle, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without effort, wealth without work, business without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice? — Ezra Taft Benson

Amidst all the hype and hoopla around this business, I wanted to emphasize the challenge - it is seductive but the failure rate is very high. And those who fail have no good place to go. — Mahendra Ramsinghani

Many small businesses are doomed from day one, not from competition or the economy, but from the ignorance of their owners ... their destiny is already decided because they have no idea how a business should be operated. — William Manchee

Look at each failure as a deposit made into the account that will help you write the check for your next significant success. — Bobby Darnell

A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you are a business failure, — J. Paul Getty

Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. Fortunemagazine{115} — Thomas Sowell

I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income,for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. — Henry David Thoreau

Any business owner or entrepreneur knows that there is no luck or good fortune about keeping a company up and running. It's nothing but hard work, consistency, determination, courage, staying focused, accepting failure, making changes, and simply keeping on with the grind. — Enaka Yembe

By any objective measure, the modern business of "psychopharmacology" - the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself - has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows. — James Gleick

The average member of the public thinks of 'business' as an impersonal corporate entity owned by the very rich and managed by overpaid executives. There is an almost total failure to appreciate that 'business' actually embraces - in one way or another - most Americans. — Lewis F. Powell Jr.

In addition, if a person makes the error of identifying self with his work (rather than with the internal virtues that make the work possible), if self-esteem is tied primarily to accomplishments, success, income, or being a good family provider, the danger is that economic circumstances beyond the individual's control may lead to the failure of the business or the loss of a job, flinging him into depression or acute demoralization. — Nathaniel Branden

Failure doesn't means falling down; it means hiding somewhere to safeguard own interest. — Ashish Patel

But far too often when we face the failure of a business venture, we let that failure paralyze us from trying again. The failure could stem from a lack of financial planning, a lack of resources, or the lack of the right team members. But you have to realize that failure is part of the process when you are on the road to success. The only way to get back on track is to come up with another plan. I've failed more times than I can count. But you can't let the failure freeze you in place and stop you from pursuing your dreams. — Steve Harvey

In today's media environment, invisibility is a fate much worse than failure for any business large or small. — Peg Samuel

A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits - marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it is the business of education to further. — John Dewey

Confidence believes you are able. Competence knows you are able. — Lolly Daskal

NBC's pilot season of 1994 is legendary in the business. In a world where failure is commonplace, we midwifed the birth of both 'Friends' and 'ER'. While 'ER' came essentially out of the blue, we'd been casting around for a 'Friends'-like show for some time at the network. — Warren Littlefield

Competing on price is what leaves most startup brands bankrupt — Bernard Kelvin Clive

Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. — H.L. Mencken

It also reflects a tendency in our society to focus on negatives. Doctors, for instance, study illness, not health. Business leaders analyse failure, not success. Economists study cost, not value. Philosophers mostly debate original sin, not original blessing. — Robert Holden

And when a woman does fail, she is more likely to believe it's personal - she sucked - while men view it as circumstantial (the business sucked). It's not all bad. Women's fear of failure may prompt them to become better informed; they take the time to read up on their ideas so they can supply evidence. But then of course
there's the feedback loop: People who fear failure are less likely to put forward ideas, to take intellectual risks, and more likely to quit. They tend to avoid new challenges in favor of sticking to what they're already good [at]. — Jessica Bennett

The greatest challenge to most innovation centers around the world is many nations' punitive attitudes towards failure. In most of the world, if your first business fails, no one will work with you again. But, trial and error is the genesis of innovation. — Jay Samit

Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you're due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings. — Donald Van De Mark

Yes, I think it's okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It's okay to say to them, You're not going where I need to go, and there's no way I'm going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I'm heading off. I'm betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me. — Seth Godin

None of us ever do," said Mrs. Allan with a sigh. "But then, Anne, you know what Lowell says, 'Not failure but low aim is crime.' We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them. With them it's grand and great. Hold fast to your ideals, Anne. — L.M. Montgomery

Innovation implies high risk, and with high risk comes failure, so you've got to be prepared for that, but if you don't risk, then your business goes stale very quickly. — Michael Grade

Mind your business had been the motto of her childhood. But now that seemed like a failing in a friend. — Anita Diamant

If you hear my idea but don't believe it, that's not your fault; it's mine. If you see my new product but don't buy it, that's my failure, not yours. If you attend my presentation and you're bored, that's my fault too. — Seth Godin

A leader should have higher endurance and ability to accept and embrace failure. — Jack Ma

Unfortunately, they develop a fixed mindset that they're the most talented, and they think that continued success is a right. Problems arise because pure talent only works as long as the going is easy. Furthermore, they don't take risks because failure would harm their image of being the best, brightest, and most talented. When they do fail, they deny it or attribute it to anything but their shortcomings. — Guy Kawasaki

At the same time that "self-made" entered the nation's lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode - "I made a failure," a merchant would say after losing his shop - "failure" in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase "I feel like a failure" comes to us so naturally today "that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul." It became conventional wisdom in the early nineteenth century, Sandage explains, that people who failed had a problem native to their constitution. They weren't just losers; they were "born losers. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there. — Jonathan Kozol

Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line. — Richard Branson

Books proliferate, and occasionally sell in very large numbers, which claim to have found the rule, or small set of rules, which will guarantee business success. But business is far too complicated, far too difficult an activity to distil into a few simple commands ... It is failure rather than success which is the distinguishing feature of corporate life. — Paul Ormerod

Failure to commit is as bad as failure to start. — David Hieatt

But she wasn't really listening, because underneath it all ran the fear that it had nothing to do with good fortune, that he had earned this, and she resented him because she could have done it, too, if she'd applied herself properly, become a lawyer, moved to Canada, run a business, and what she saw when she looked at Richard was not his success but her own failure. — Mark Haddon

Everyone is watching you. If you don't believe it, just pretend to fail and you'll see many mockers. For this reason, work hard as if you are doing everyone's business! — Israelmore Ayivor

The problem, as Randolph has realized, is that the best way for a young person to build character is for him to attempt something where there is a real and serious possibility of failure. In a high-risk endeavor, whether it's in business or athletics or the arts, you are more likely to experience colossal defeat than in a low-risk one - but you're also more likely to achieve real and original success. "The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure," Randolph explained. — Paul Tough

I don't have a fear factor. Well, not much of one. And I'm willing to risk quite a lot - as a comedian, you're always risking a lot. You're risking failure, especially if you're improvising and going on TV shows trying to make comedy out of thin air. That is quite a risky business. — David Walliams

Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities. — Walter Scott

Over commitment in business is usually due to a lack of faith, which results in fear - specifically, the fear of failure. But if we really believe God is in control, then we also should believe He's able to make us successful while we are keeping our lives in balance. — Larry Burkett

The biggest cause of serious error in this business is a failure of communication, — Atul Gawande

Failure is important because the first time you win (or lose), it could be luck, it could be timing, or it could be talent. It's only after you fail once or twice and learn to rely equally on thought, analysis, and anticipation-in addition to speed, talent, and execution-that you can really call yourself an entrepreneur ... In the long run, it's mind over muscle, strategy over strength, and a healthy perspective-not just a lot of perspiration-that make someone a real success in his or her business and in the equally important rest of his or her life. — Howard A. Tullman

Imaginary testing is unreliable, and in many cases, it's a huge waste of time and energy. In truth you just don't know what will happen until you try. You may start a business, and it could take off in ways no one could predict. Or it could be a complete failure. You could ask for a date and end up with the partner of your dreams. Or you could be rejected cold. It's great to visualize what you want, but you never really know what's going to happen until you act. — Steve Pavlina

Failure promotes success only if you actually take the time to analyze your mistakes.." "Failure has to be separated from fault, and for many people that requires a bit of deprogramming, as we learn early on that they are one and the same." "In this framework, intention is extremely important. — Amanda Lang

Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once. — Drew Houston

I'm definitely happy with the way my career has gone, the success; but I even feel glad that I've experienced some failure in my life. That gives you perspective and humility about this business; it's good to realize that you're always just one movie away from not being in Vogue anymore. — Reese Witherspoon

Frequent risk-takers have had their fair shares of failures and successes, hence, being confident in reaching their goals, they will usually seem insensitive to whether or not they look foolish or cool to other people. — Criss Jami

What I didn't realize at the time was that living through that bust was the luckiest thing that would ever happen to me. It taught me perhaps the single most important lesson about business and about life: Things go wrong more often than they go right. Failure is actually a natural - even crucial - element of a healthy economy. — Scott Fearon

The dieting industry is the only profitable business in the world with a 98 percent failure rate. — Charlotte Markey

The term "escalation of commitment" was first coined by Barry Staw, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley.4 It's defined as a decision-making pattern in which a person - for our purposes, a business leader - continues to support or believe in a strategy even after it has continually failed. Escalation of commitment is often described as the inability to let go, or as an obsessive need to try to succeed even when failure is inevitable. — Laurence G. Weinzimmer

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail. — Napoleon Hill

My father believed strongly, and taught me, that you can't let yourself get too high on a success or too low on a failure. In this volatile business, that's useful to know. — Samuel Goldwyn Jr.

Warren Buffett said that he would not invest in any business where the owner hasn't failed at least twice. I love that truly wealthy and successful people understand that failure is part of the process. — Steve Harvey

Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling. — John Dewey

This is important stuff, so it's crucial not to get too serious, to realize that this is all fun and games. The attitude 'business is serious, it's not fun and games' leads to financial failure, and I won't tolerate it in my company. — Martha N. Beck

Peter Drucker says that the worst kind of failure in business is success in the things that don't matter. — J.D. Greear

Fail your way forward. Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim. Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating. If you're afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job. Failure's lessons are essential to success. — Steve Pavlina

Many companies expect loyal customers without providing loyal service. This has been the visionary failure of countless corporations. — Steve Maraboli

Succeeding in business and failing at home is a cop-out. For no success in the workplace will ever make up for failure at home. — Howard G. Hendricks

In business, poor performance leads to bankruptcy or, at a minimum, a restructuring of the company. In American education, failure entitles the bankrupt system to even more taxpayer dollars. — Cal Thomas

People in the business will stay with you through drugs and alcohol and divorces and insanity and everything else, but you have a failure, pal, and they don't want to know nothing about you! — Don Johnson

We may not be able to stop satan from doing his business, but we can scheme to make his business to yield a loss! All things ... I mean "all", "all things", "everything" is working for our good! — Israelmore Ayivor

Failure or success in business is primarily not determined by mental capacity but by MENTAL ATTITUDES — Walter Dill Scott

Kafka regarded the end of "The Metamorphosis"- its composition in interrupted by a business trip- as "unreadable." He also wrote in his diary that he found it"bad," but of course Kafka relished his failure. Failure is precisely what he expected and resolved to accomplish- and he hid behind it. — Franz Kafka

China has seen a great deal of economic progress. It's certainly rather of a miracle. The growing role of the market in the economy will force China to open up its political system over time and to move toward a more democratic society. So taken as a whole, the one real failure in this whole business has been Russia. — Milton Friedman

I have no use for men who fail. The cause of their failure is no business of mine, but I want successful men as my associates. — John D. Rockefeller

With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake and failure, not only mine, but of those around me, I learned what not to do. I also got to study the success of those I did business with as well. I had more than a healthy dose of fear, and an unlimited amount of hope, and more importantly, no limit on time and effort. — Mark Cuban

Failure is the most terrible thing in our business. When we fail, the whole world knows about it. — Desi Arnaz

Advertising is prima facie evidence that the man who pays believes that advertising is good. It has brought great results to others, it must be good for him. So he takes it like some secret tonic which others have endorsed. If the business thrives, the tonic gets the credit. Otherwise, the failure is due to fate. — Claude C. Hopkins

Fear of failure is closely connected with the apprehension of failure in any field of life, such as career, business, education of private life — Sunday Adelaja

Some people get along beautifully, for half a lifetime, perhaps, while everything goes smoothly. While they are accumulating property and gaining friends and reputation, their characters seem to be strong and well-balanced; but the moment there is friction anywhere, - the moment trouble comes, a failure in business, a panic, or a great crisis in which they lose their all, - they are overwhelmed. They despair, lose heart, courage, faith, hope, and power to try again, - everything. Their very manhood or womanhood is swallowed up by a mere material loss. — Orison Swett Marden

How important is failure - yes, failure - to the health of a thriving, innovative business? So important that Ratan Tata, chairman of India's largest corporation, gives an annual award to the employee who comes up with the best idea that failed. — Naveen Jain

You know what Lowell says, 'Not failure but low aim is crime.' We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them. With — L.M. Montgomery

Business executives do not understand true IT needs and are inspired by external vendors and other sources. The business dictates a solution, IT accepts it, and then IT resources are consumed by the complexity of a non-optimal solution. There is pressure to deliver and consequently a high failure rate, rework rate, and, hence, low confidence in IT. This leads to further breakdown in IT business relationships and fuels more misaligned initiatives from an IT perspective. — Ashu Bhatia

Now I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips - whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company Bain Capital with all the jobs that they killed, I'm sure he was worried that he'd run out of pink slips. There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business and I happen to think that's indefensible. If you're a victim of Bain Capital's downsizing, it's the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain, because he caused it. — Rick Perry

Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. — John Harvey-Jones

Believe you can and you will be halfway there. — Lolly Daskal

I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into
managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a
manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often
neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go
after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that
producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.
Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get
muscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the most
ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street - why
Salomon Brothers is getting crunched now - because the ruthless people
are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure. — Michael Lewis

It doesn't matter how many times you fail. It doesn't matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because all that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are. — Mark Cuban

Innovation without insight is failure. — Mark Simmonds

IT - especially with its role so greatly enlarged by the arrival of the Internet - has changed not only how we work and conduct business, but also how we (and our customers) play, how we consume, and how we educate our next generations. And yet the IT phenomenon, so evident in the expenditures of every organization, has not yet achieved management attention equal to other areas, such as finance, marketing, operations, and human resources. In far too many companies, IT remains a black box that business managers rarely try to see inside. When business managers do engage in IT discussions, often they bring little expertise to bear. Few feel apologetic about their IT inadequacies. But the time is coming when "I'm not an IT person" will be no more adequate as a manager's defense in the aftermath of a major corporate problem than Jeff Skilling's now notorious "I'm not an accountant" - that CEOs effort to explain his failure to foresee or prevent Enron's spectacular implosion. — Robert D. Austin

Great leaders inspire greatness in others. — Lolly Daskal

We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. — Randy Komisar

Starting a business isn't for everyone, and it's not what you should do if you aren't sure what else to do. It requires thick skin and the willingness to carry a great deal of stress, sometimes alone. It's more often a life of failure than a life of success, and the majority of successes came after a long road of disappointment, and often shame. — Kathryn Minshew

There was no one with whom to share his world, and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. In business he could do anything, achieve anything, he refused to accept failure - but he couldn't create a woman, and he couldn't fall in love with one who simply wasn't there. — Quent Cordair

When something doesn't go exactly to plan, money is tight or a business is struggling - see it as a challenge rather than a failure. Look outside the box and try and find a solution - you'll be surprised how many great opportunities and possibilities arise when things look bad. You've just got to open your mind and not be afraid of sticking your neck out! — Richard Branson

Running helped me learn how to deal with failure, and failure is a big part of the Internet business. — Chad Hurley

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

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

Like many others, I have deep misgivings about the state of education in the United States. Too many of our students fail to graduate from high school with the basic skills they will need to succeed in the 21st Century economy, much less prepared for the rigors of college and career. Although our top universities continue to rank among the best in the world, too few American students are pursuing degrees in science and technology. Compounding this problem is our failure to provide sufficient training for those already in the workforce. — Bill Gates