Quotes & Sayings About Successful Companies

The history of antitrust law enforcement shows that successful antitrust prosecutions have often strengthened and brought vitality to extremely large companies and businesses. — Robert Kennedy

The companies that are the most influential and most successful are the ones that care about impact and the influence they have on the world. — Paul Buchheit

In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history. — Michael Dell

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL started out as an online video gaming network. — Marc Andreessen

You should focus relentlessly on something you're good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future. For the startup world, this means you should not necessarily start your own company, even if you are extraordinarily talented. If anything, too many people are starting their own companies today. People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it's growing fast. The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you'll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing). — Peter Thiel

Successful companies in social media function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners than as traditional advertisers. — Erik Qualman

Many entrepreneurs that made their fortunes by founding successful technology companies want to give back and solve the world's biggest problems on a grand scale. There is tremendous opportunity in this approach. — Peter Diamandis

You can always pound out demos and send them to record companies, but most of the successful bands I've seen are the ones that can sustain themselves. — Joe Perry

I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos. — Alfred Lin

Often they [writers on the study of management] have a point of view based upon intuition and experience. They then offer a cadence of two-paragraph examples carefully selected to "prove" their theory, and then they write "one size fits all" books. The message is, "If you'd do what these companies did, you'd be successful too." — Clayton Christensen

Truly visionary and successful companies have discovered that there is no conflict between the pursuit of profit and having a pursuit beyond profit. — David Maister

It is a simple fact of life on earth that there is going to be no successful mitigation of the climate change problem without a truly global effort. All developing companies or all major developing countries have to be part of that and accept substantial constraints on greenhouse gas emissions. — Ross Garnaut

thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night? — Jason Jennings

Being an entrepreneur and starting new companies require a lot of sacrifice. Sacrifice that you have to make. Because in order to be really successful, your company becomes your life. And then you have to really dedicate your time and energy fully to this endeavor that you start. — Anousheh Ansari

If I had to spend equal time doing paintings, and equal time going to galleries and doing art business, and equal time making music, and equal time going to record companies, or to the publicist or to the lawyer, forget it. It would take four times as long to do all that stuff. Unless I had a patron. That's why Leonardo da Vinci was successful. He had the Medicis, right? — Debbie Harry

We have witnessed the most educated, successful, and monied professionals in the country put their companies - not to mention their own liberty - at risk by engaging in flagrant and foolhardy illegal conduct. — Preet Bharara

Companies that have been built and operated for a long time are the most successful companies. — Brian Acton

If you think about companies that were built in Silicon Valley, a lot of them early on were chip companies. And now the companies that are there, like Apple, are much more successful than any of the chip companies were. — Mark Zuckerberg

What if the slowdown in merger activity isn't cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done? — Andrew Ross Sorkin

They, the lawmakers, were hoodwinked by the insurance companies who are still funding the national tort reform movement, a political crusade that has been wildly successful. Virtually every state has fallen in line with caps on damages and other laws designed to keep folks away from the courthouse. So far, no one has seen a decline in insurance rates. An investigative report by my pal at the Chronicle revealed that 90 percent of our legislators took campaign money from the insurance industry. And this is considered a democracy. — John Grisham

The companies that are successful, they start out to make meaning, not to make money. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Northleaf is delighted to have been chosen to manage the new fund. We look forward to implementing the fund's long-term strategy of constructing a portfolio of high-potential venture capital funds with the scale and resources to execute their plans, support successful high-growth companies and deliver world-class returns. — Jeff Pentland

I feel like I went through the Great Depression. All these companies are being successful around you, you're on that track, and then the market collapses, and you're out of a job. You're trying to save your investors' investment, and it doesn't work, and you sell the company for nothing. It was brutal. — Nick Woodman

Quality is the one absolutely necessary ingredient of all the most successful companies in the world. — Frank Perdue

I've become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are. — Patrick Lencioni

What can we learn from the battle between data and design? What can we learn from the relationship between Google and Apple? Clearly no one school of thought is right: Apple and Google are both wildly successful and profitable companies that changed the world. — Ben Parr

It's understandable that the music companies that are comprised of people that are successful by making good creative decisions - they have to decide which out of fifty artists is the next hot one, with no data to go from. It's an intuitive process, and that's what they do well when they're successful. They don't understand technology. — Steve Jobs

If your endeavors result in success of the company in a continuity of at
least a few years, you are a successful manager. If other companies follow
your business approach, you are certainly an important manager with
leader characteristics. — Eraldo Banovac

Management guru Jim Collins has some good words here. He and Morten T. Hansen studied leadership in turbulent times. They looked at more than twenty thousand companies, sifting through data in search of an answer to this question: Why in uncertain times do some companies thrive while others do not? They concluded, "[Successful leaders] are not more creative. They're not more visionary. They're not more charismatic. They're not more ambitious. They're not more blessed by luck. They're not more risk-seeking. They're not more heroic. And they're not more prone to making big, bold moves." Then what sets them apart? "They all led their teams with a surprising method of self-control in an out-of-control world."2 — Max Lucado

Successful companies will almost always be described in terms of a clear strategy, good organization, strong corporate culture, and customer focus. But whether these things drive company performance, or whether they're mainly attributions based on performance, is a different matter. — Phil Rosenzweig

The most successful companies make the core progression - to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets - a part of their founding narrative. — Peter Thiel

the breakthrough researcher first discovers the fundamental causal mechanism behind the phenomena of success. This allows those who are looking for "an answer" to get beyond the wings-and-feathers mind-set of copying the attributes of successful companies. — Clayton M Christensen

We Experiment Endlessly, With New Products, New Methods, New Companies And New Marketing. A Successful Business The Emphasis Is On Experiment And Development, Ideas Are The Lifeblood Of Business. — Richard Branson

They have a policy in China for their big companies called "Go abroad." It's a rational thing for both the company and the country to say, "We want big, successful companies." Particularly in areas where they need it: agriculture, energy, technology. I think banking, too. One or two have bought a trading house. Some have already begun expanding around the world. Of course they're going to have those ambitions. Why wouldn't they? They're just doing it methodically. It's a logical strategy and, well-executed, they will succeed. — Jamie Dimon

Successful companies obviously have people with ideas and energy. — Hasso Plattner

I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted the whole thing quite a bit. — Ben Horowitz

I've seen how important this concept is in business. To be truly successful, companies need to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit. We try to follow that at salesforce, where we give 1% of our equity, 1% of our profits, and 1% of our employees' time to the community. By integrating philanthropy into our business model our employees feel that they do much more than just work at our company. By sharing a common and important mission, we are united and focused, and have found a secret weapon that ensures we always win. — Marc Benioff

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

You know what - gyms make the largest chunk of their profit from clients who pay their monthly dues on auto-pay but never bother to show up and use the gym. The DVD-rental companies make a good chunk of their profits from late fees; the credit-card companies make a fortune on sundry fines and penalties; the airlines' margins are highest on ticket changes and cancellations ... So, the key to running a successful business in America is to sign up a customer and pray he'll somehow screw up ... — Ali Sheikh

The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there's not enough information to do that - it's an intuitive process. — Steve Jobs

companies are focused on building products rather than brands. A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind. To be successful today, you have to build brands, not products. And you build brands by using positioning strategies, starting with a good name. Any — Al Ries

The key is not to figure out what the best people are doing and try to emulate it - rather, figure out what causes people and companies to be successful. — Clayton Christensen

Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders. — Brad Stone

He's a family man and a businessman. He spent his career building successful companies. Then, he saved the 2002 Olympics and brought pride to our nation. As governor, he balanced the budget, cut taxes, and created jobs. The president America needs is Mitt Romney! — Reince Priebus

Many of the deficiencies of our economic system could be alleviated if ways were found to broaden the ownership of the means of production ... This has happened in some companies through ESOPs. Successful approaches of this sort would pay dividends in terms of employee commitment and morale. And they would not deprive anyone of his present holdings since they are based on future growth. — John D. Rockefeller

Companies will need to pursue a more diversified business model, but I think those companies that have what I call a focused diversified business model will be more successful. — Kenneth Chenault

If you start a successful company in China at 11 A.M., by 2 P.M. there's three more companies like it. — Douglas Leone

Individuals and companies that want to be successful in the 21st century will need to be leaders in using the Internet and related technology. — William Clay Ford Jr.

The principal reason, invariably, most "successful" giant companies rather quickly become also-rans, or just amorphous blobs on the competitive landscape, is their failure to re-tool in anything like a fundamental way. In fact, the worse things get, typically, the more they dig in their heels and defend yesterday's turf. — Tom Peters

To me it seems pretty obvious that it would be simple to build a business around helping people achieve autonomy, a feeling of competence and relatedness. In fact, every web company that has been successful thusfar has their business build solidly on one or all of these. And I believe that as people discover that these things are within their reach, they will gravitate more and more towards companies that offer tools to helping them achieve happiness. — Tara Hunt

I look forward to the day when half our homes are run by men and half our companies and institutions are run by women. When that happens, it won't just mean happier women and families; it will mean more successful businesses and better lives for us all. — Sheryl Sandberg

Not only is there no longer a mass market, but most of the successful companies, game-changing innovations, and products and services we care about were designed to cater to people at the edges of that curve, not to the average Joe in the middle of it. — Bernadette Jiwa

Bottom line. All companies are in business to make money, but being successful at it is not the reason why things change so drastically. That only points to a symptom. Without understanding the reason it happened in the first place, the pattern will repeat for every other company that makes it big. It is not destiny or some mystical business cycle that transforms successful — Simon Sinek

I talked to my partners (about) the decision I wanted to do and we all wished each other good luck. My partners have been very successful in the companies that we've created. They're very happy about it and have the mindset to run them and do well with them. — Drew Waters

The successful companies try to keep the new entrants down. Now that's great for a company like ours. We make more money that way because we have less competition and less innovation. But for the country as a whole, it's horrible. — Charles Koch

To be successful, you should concentrate on the world of companies, not arcane accounting mathematics. — Warren Buffett

We don't expect Google as a first party service to provide all the answers. Part of the reason a platform is successful is because there are very very important things from other companies and other developers on top of the platform. — Sundar Pichai

The most successful executives are often men who have built their own companies. Ironically their very success frequently brings to them and members of their families personal problems of an intensity rarely encountered by professional managers. And these problems make family businesses probably the most difficult to operate. — Harry Levinson

I'd rather people talked about the 1,000 most successful French Internet companies instead of the 5 or 10 faces we already know - including mine. — Xavier Niel

I'm speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be. — Tim Cook

But the process should not be confused with science. When tests are used as selections devices, they're not a neutral tool; they become a large factor int he very equation they purport to measure. For one thing, the tests tend to screen out - or repel - those who would upset the correlation. If a man can't get into the company in the first place because he isn't the company type, he can't very well get to be an executive and be tested in a study to find out what kind if profile subsequent executives should match. Long before personality tests were invented, of course, plenty of companies proved that if you only hire people of a certain type, then all your successful men will be people of that type. But no one confused this with the immutable laws of science. — William H. Whyte

In fact, I believe the first companies that make an effort to develop an authentic, transparent, and meaningful social contract with their fans and customers will turn out to be the ones that are the most successful in the future. While brands that refuse to make the effort will lose stature and customer loyalty. — Simon Mainwaring

I started off with a company, InfoSpace, with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies and I went on to start Intelius and Moon Express. Now, I focus my time on using the skills of an entrepreneur to solve many of the grand challenges facing us in the areas of education, healthcare, clean water and energy. — Naveen Jain

Often, there is no correlation between the success of a company's operations and the success of its stock over a few months or even a few years. In the long term, there is a 100 percent correlation between the success of the company and the success of its stock. This disparity is the key to making money; it pays to be patient, and to own successful companies. — Peter Lynch

Successful companies create value by providing products or services their customers value more highly than available alternatives. They do this while consuming fewer resources, leaving more resources available to satisfy other needs in society. Value creation involves making people's lives better. It is contributing to prosperity in society. — Charles Koch

[Successful] projects that entrepreneurs initiated and carried through had one essential quality. All had been thoroughly contemplated by the regnant experts and dominant companies, with their large research staffs and financial resources, and had been judged too difficult, untimely, risky, expensive and unprofitable. — George Gilder

If you look at the CEOs of some the most successful companies in the world like IKEA, they never fly first class. They always go economy. — Gene Simmons

We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the best ... end up giving a lot of stock out to employees- year after year after year. — Sam Altman

My father will always be my hero. He pioneered two successful companies that paved the way for the technology services industry and has devoted much of his life to helping people in need and those who serve our nation in the armed forces. — Ross Perot Jr.

Some of the biggest bores I've ever known are men who have been highly successful in business, particularly self-made heads of big companies. Before the first olive has settled into the first martini, they pour the stories of their lives into the nearest and sometimes the remotest ears capturable ... These men have indeed paid the price of success. To rise to the top of a big company often takes a totality of effort, concentration and dedication. Others, too, have to pay part of the price. Wife and children are out of mind even when in sight ... — Malcolm Forbes

My dad is an unbelievable entrepreneur who balanced his life as a father and a president of two very successful companies. — Rachel Zoe

There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common: None was started by one person. — Ernesto Sirolli

The companies that do the best job on managing a user's privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful. — Fred Wilson

The growth of a company like ours tends to be a relatively steady because, like some of the other successful mixed signal companies, we have a wide range of products servicing a wide range of end applications. — David Milne

When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don't understand creativity. They don't appreciate intuitive thinking, like the ability of an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a hundred artists and have a feel for which five might be successful. And they think that creative people just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined, because they've not seen how driven and disciplined the creative folks at places like Pixar are. On the other hand, music companies are completely clueless about technology. They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks. But that would be like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We'd get second-rate A&R people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people. I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline. — Walter Isaacson

In the euphoria of victory, Nazis tried to organize a boycott of Jewish shops. This was not very successful at first. But the practice of marking one firm as "Jewish" and another as "Aryan" with paint on the windows or walls did affect the way Germans thought about household economics. A shop marked "Jewish" had no future. It became an object of covetous plans. As property was marked as ethnic, envy transformed ethics. If shops could be "Jewish," what about other companies and properties? The wish that Jews might disappear, perhaps suppressed at first, rose as it was leavened by greed. Thus the Germans who marked shops as "Jewish" participated in the process by which Jews really did disappear - as did people who simply looked on. Accepting the markings as a natural part of the urban landscape was already a compromise with a murderous future. You — Timothy Snyder

To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest - quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all - will follow. — Ricardo Semler

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend. — Clayton M Christensen

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies. — Mitch Kapor

The Curbside founders are successful entrepreneurs, who each have sold their companies to Apple. — Jerry Yang

The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations. — Clayton Christensen

There's a pure and simple business case for diversity: Companies that are more diverse are more successful. — Mindy Grossman

In its 2013 annual report on "Global Risks," the World Economic Forum (host of the annual superelite gathering in Davos), stated plainly, "Although the Alaskan village of Kivalina - which faces being 'wiped out' by the changing climate - was unsuccessful in its attempts to file a US$ 400 million lawsuit against oil and coal companies, future plaintiffs may be more successful. Five decades ago, the U.S. tobacco industry would not have suspected that in 1997 it would agree to pay $368 billion in health-related damages. — Naomi Klein

Too many companies believe that all they must do is provide a 'neat' technology or some 'cool' product or, sometimes, just good, solid engineering. Nope. All of those are desirable (and solid engineering is a must), but there is much more to a successful product than that: understanding how the product is to be used, design, engineering, positioning, marketing, branding-all matter. It requires designing the Total User Experience. — Donald A. Norman

First, when a strategic inflection point sweeps through the industry, the more successful a participant was in the old industry structure, the more threatened it is by change and the more reluctant it is to adapt to it. Second, whereas the cost to enter a given industry in the face of well-entrenched participants can be very high, when the structure breaks, the cost to enter may become trivially small, giving rise to Compaqs, Dells and Novells, each of which emerged from practically nothing to become major corporations. What's common among these companies is that they all instinctively followed the rules for success in a horizontal industry. — Andrew S. Grove

Eighty percent of the cases used in the typical MBA program are about successful companies. Students graduate with this notion that 'If I do everything that the people in those cases did, then my organization will grow and be successful, too.' — Clayton Christensen

Countries with higher levels of gender equality have higher economic growth. Companies with more women on their boards have higher returns. Peace agreements that include women are more successful. Parliaments with more women take up a wider range of issues - including health, education, anti-discrimination, and child support. — Ban Ki-moon

Tech companies have a finite lifespan: For the successful ones, an IPO or exit is never more than a few years off. But by recruiting locally and developing homegrown talent, companies can build something that remains after they're gone. People, skills and a culture of innovation persist. — Ryan Holmes

Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories. — Ben Horowitz

Companies that banked their future on broadband - most of them are not very successful. — Jerry Yang

Successful companies are started, and made successful, by at least two, and usually more, soulmates. — Guy Kawasaki

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

Personally, I feel that a company which looks at problems of other companies and learns from their mistakes is a successful one. — Dilip Shanghvi

If we look at the happiest, most successful people and companies, they're those that have a positive attitude about continuously improving. It's growth. It's something new. It's an adventure. — Laurie Sudbrink

Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies. — Bill Gates

Instead of attacking successful American companies, Europe's leaders should ask themselves why their continent has not produced a Google or a Facebook. — Anonymous

There are a handful of companies who understand all successful business operations come down to three basic principles; People
Product
Profit. Without top people, you cannot do much with the other two. — Malcolm Forbes

Successful organizations and companies share the stage with their best storytellers. Brands are a collection of narratives. Unleash your best stories. — Carmine Gallo

Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation. — J.G. Ballard