Walther Rathenau Quotes

If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.

I learned a lot from Jack Welch about how to run a business.

I decided that there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business, as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon: behind the bar and not in front of it.

I've learned a lot about business from snowboarding: how companies run, how the game works.

I always try and watch how business people think. I like to read a lot about business people. I'm not going to say I've got a great business mind, but I enjoy learning from the world of business.

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people do not get this straight in their heads. But a fellow like Buffett does. For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles-which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, "They've invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones."

For a hot-shot CEO taking over a troubled company, mass firings are the ultimate quick fix, the accounting equivalent of crack: cheap, easy to score, instantly gratifying, and highly addictive.

Most people assume that a record shop's success lies in selling records. In fact, Virgin's success both in mail order and the record shops lay in skill at buying records.

Rich Christiansen is one of the most insightful, practical and cost-conscious entrepreneurs in the world today. Listen to Rich. He won't steer you wrong.

In order to understand the movement of prices, you need not an oscilloscope to measure the entire market and reduce it to noise, but a microscope to investigate the creative process behind every company and its price.

The key thing in any kind of guiding of the business is how do you create a strong organization that is kind of accelerating into the future. And when you're in trouble, the question is, what are the techniques that you can, you know, trim, refinance, sell, et cetera, in order to get this business back to that characteristic.

I'm very analytical about the industry and I understand that there are value systems, and all sorts of things like that.

It's a lot easier to think of an app and write it than it is to convince people to want it.

Harvey , Galileo , Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.

I try to find people who love and believe in what I do - and people I can respect because they do what I don't do. I've had to bring in financial people and put them in positions where they could tell me, "Ralph, let's not do that."

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

You want an idea that not many other people are working on, and it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first.

Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves.

We grow by letting the customer tell us. So when the customer tells us that they're frustrated, that they just got their catalogue and we're already out of a product they wanted, then it tells me that we're not making enough. We let the customer tell us instead of creating an artificial demand for our products. Any time you're making products that people don't need, you're at the mercy of the economy, you're at the mercy of whatever is going on. So we tried to avoid that situation.

Seeing sound, the high order stuff that's not audible still affects how everything else behaves. There might be a visual metaphor for that somewhere.

When we start a new venture, we base it on hard research and analysis. Typically, we review the industry and put ourselves in our customer's shoes to see what we could do better.

There are many reasons, of course, why someone might snap their fingers and grin. If you heard some pleasing music, for instance, you might snap your fingers and grin to demonstrate that the music had charms that could soothe your savage breast. If you were employed as a spy, you might snap your fingers and grin in order to deliver a message in secret snapping-and-grinning code.

Our goal is long-term growth in revenue and absolute profit - so we invest aggressively in future innovation while tightly managing our short-term costs.

He that would run his company on visible figures alone will in time have neither company nor figures.