Quotes & Sayings About Failure In Business

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

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

Quotes = Success
Music = Success
Failure = Success
Loyalty = Success
Books = Success
Mistakes = Success
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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

As for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that. Let not your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. It will prove a failure ... It is a greater strain than any soul can long endure. When you get God to pulling one way, and the devil the other, each having his feet well braced,
to say nothing of the conscience sawing transversely,
almost any timber will give way. — Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

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

If everything came easy in business everyone would have a business and be millionaires. It takes hard work, consistent effort and courage to keeping fighting the monster of failure. — Delaine Robins

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

Call it the Tiger Mom effect: In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. — Naveen Jain

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

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

Entrepreneurialism, to me, means being able to fail. And I believe that kind of leadership is not necessary only in business, but it's necessary for running countries, too. You've got to be able to believe in something strongly enough that you want to do it even if there's a risk of failure. — Bernard L. Schwartz

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

I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective. I don't want a football player who doesn't take defeat to heart, who laughs it off with the thought, "Oh, well, there's another Saturday." The trouble in American life today, in business as well as in sports, is that too many people are afraid of competition. The result is that in some circles people have come to sneer at success if it costs hard work and training and sacrifice. — Knute Rockne

My major goal in business was to learn. I had legislated in my mind for failure the worse possible scenario was I would learn a lot regardless of the outcome. This goal was the foundation for success of the business. Peldi, Balsamiq — Kevin Kelly DO The Pursuit Of Xceptional Execution

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

What was most surprising, she was giving him the hardest thing to do first, but by failure at the great one he was learning the easier tasks with infallible power and skill. How different that is from our human way of training people, with the easiest always first. In nature animals cannot afford such long drawn-out step-by-step training. Animal children cannot be segregated in the schoolroom from the sharp experiences of life. They have to be educated in the heart of life itself. The easy and the difficult befall them without any sequence. It is a pity that in civilisation man has made the business of education so sequestered and slow. — Dhan Gopal Mukerji

I've had many failures in terms of technological ... business ... and even research failures. I really believe that entrepreneurship is about being able to face failure, manage failure and succeed after failing. — Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

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

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 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

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

Willpower determines success in business, interpersonal relationships, health, whatever it is. All the activities in your life, success and failure in them, are dependent upon your ability to manifest will. — Frederick Lenz

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

People learn best and fastest from making their own mistakes and fixing them. It's painful to watch a child flounder, but in the long run children become more resilient and resourceful if they have to deal with failure once in a while. One of the biggest fears of today's business strategists is that we are producing a coddled workforce of straight "A" students who are afraid to go out on a limb for fear they'll fall. American innovation was born out of metaphorical scraped knees and bloody noses. A generation that's been told they shouldn't even touch a doorknob without applying antibacterial hand sanitizer may not have the rough and tumble qualities needed to compete in a global dog-eat-dog economy. — Lynne C. Lancaster

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

Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success.* The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

There are few experiences in life as painful and brutal as the failure of a small business. For a small business conceived and nurtured by its owner is like a living, breathing child. Its loss is no less traumatic than losing a loved one. — William Manchee

The more successful enterprises are the more they try to replicate, duplicate, codify what makes us great. And suddenly they're inward thinking. They're thinking how can we continue to do what we've done in the past without understanding that what made them successful is to take risks, to change and to adapt and to be responsive. And so in a sense success breeds its own failure. And I think it's true of a lot of successful businesses. — Lou Gerstner

I challenge every business person in America who has ever complained about the failure of the welfare system to try to hire somebody off welfare. And try hard. — William J. Clinton

In business, the earning of profit is something more than an incident of success. It is an essential condition of success. It is an essential condition of success because the continued absence of profit itself spells failure. — Louis D. Brandeis

[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary. — Iain Pears

The boys just wanted to light the oven, but they ended up burning down the whole business and the family home. The children were saved, but the Ole Kirk Kristiansen's future looked bleak.

Ole Kirk was a religious man; his optimism and sense of humour were well-known far beyond the local boundaries. Where others would have folded their hands in their laps and accepted their fate, he did not give up. With the courage born of desperation, he rebuilt his business on a larger and more expensive scale than it had been previously - and more so than he could afford: Many rooms had to be sublet, and the Kristiansens themselves only used a small part of the building. Apprentices were no longer paid, but received board and lodging instead. Life continued, somehow. — Christian Humberg

Debtors and idlers abounded in the colonial era, but failing in business was not so calamitous as falling from grace... In Early America, fear of failure loomed largest on Sunday. Monday morning dawned about the year 1800. By then, 'failure' meant an entrepreneurial failure. — Scott A. Sandage

The successes in the entertainment business are like one percent of the iceberg that you see, and the other ninety-nine percent, which is the rejection and the failure and the work and the toil and the sacrifice, is the rest of the iceberg that's below the water. — Jonathan Tucker

There are moments in business and in life when you have to say, "Failure is not an option." — Donny Deutsch

The diet industry has a deep interest in the failure of dieters
if everyone got skinny, they'd go out of business. — Golda Poretsky

With ruin staring you in the face, there is nothing worse to live through than a siege of waiting and hoping. If you manage to live through it, nothing can ever jar your nerves after that. — Sue Sanders

One great cause of failure of young men in business is the lack of concentration. — Andrew Carnegie

In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. We need to change this attitude toward failure - and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road. — Naveen Jain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great leaders inspire greatness in others. — Lolly Daskal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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