Ausgewählte Business Zitate im englischen Original

Warren Buffet

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

Our favorite holding period is forever.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.

Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business.


Winston Churchill

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.


Peter Drucker

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

Business, that's easily defined - it's other people's money.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't.

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.


Henry Ford

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

Don't find fault, find a remedy.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.

You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.


Steve Jobs

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet - basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?' but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?'.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.


John F. Kennedy

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.


Theodore Roosevelt

Believe you can and you're halfway there.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

With self-discipline most anything is possible.


Jack Welsh

An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Change before you have to.

Control your own destiny or someone else will.

Culture drives great results.

Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.

Number one, cash is king... number two, communicate... number three, buy or bury the competition.

The biggest cowards are managers who don't let people know where they stand.

There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.

You can't grow long-term if you can't eat short-term. Anybody can manage short. Anybody can manage long. Balancing those two things is what management is.

Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while.