Henry Kravis Quotes

I never set money as a goal. It was a result.

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.

The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.

If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.

One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.

I was able to solve enough big problems along the way that the sheriff didn't come along and put the 'bankruptcy' sign up.

The hardest part about this business is accepting the back end with the same love that you accepted the front end.

I am particularly pleased to see that the Bendheim Center for Finance is thriving.

Capital structure isn't an eyeshade economic thing: It's about your ability to protect your workforce and your service levels.

Edelman maintains a very conservative balance sheet. We do small acquisitions. This helps me sleep well at night.

I have long believed the corporate world is plagued by poor capital allocation decisions.

We'll continue to take the right actions to make sure we're a profitable business.

I don't think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.

One of the reasons that millionaires are economically successful is that they think differently.

I think that it depends what you mean by successful. If you mean 'make money' you need to be part of the machine unless you're one of those superhuman people who can do everything by yourself, and have workaholic tendencies and really good advisers and a good investor.

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

I don't count no one else's money. I want everyone to be taken care of and be able to take care of their families and be successful.

Most chief executives rise to that position by being good operating managers. Few have extensive experience or training with capital allocation. What CEO wants to return excess cash to shareholders when it could be used to expand his or her empire?

Our first use of cash is invested organically, secondly returning values our shareholders - roughly 100 percent free cash flow. And then thirdly, mergers, acquisitions, partnerships that complement our organic strategy. We are going to continue down that path.

If you were a corporation needing financial services, and I can give you something better, faster, and cheaper across 12 products as opposed to eight, that's business. I'm doing it because I'm serving you; I'm not doing it because I want to be universal.

So I think we shouldn't be overly concerned about the decline in personal saving at this particular moment and time, but it's something we certainly need to keep an eye on.

The only excuse for being broke is being in Jail.

The difference between people who succeed and people who fail, I think in many cases it’s not fear. Everyone experiences fear. The difference is what do you do with your fear. Do you work to overcome it or do you let it defeat you? And I think that is actually what distinguishes very successful people from others.

Think about last time you were broke ... now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?

Companies are returning a lot of money to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. And a lot of people say that's not a good use of capital. I think that's normal reallocation of capital.