Michael Gerber Quotes

If you're running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it's an advertising company or whether you're running a hospital.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Great companies have to manage the cadence of what they do.

As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.

If you're going to be successful, you better have a goal, you better find really good people, better understand where all the money's coming from. And you better measure the living daylights out of it.

Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business.

When I first came into baseball, people didn't want to hear that a team was a business. But it is. And the better the business is run, the healthier the team on the field is going to be.

A well-managed business will have a high return on invested capital. But that's a consequence. It's not a way to manage a business.

In business, you try to solve problems.

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.

My expertise is running businesses.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.

The only choice that leads small business owners to real success in their endeavors is the one that requires real thought. Understanding and building the systems they need within their company to afford them a framework of organization that can scale the business from a company of one to a company of one thousand.

Quit being 'busy' and start actively owning and operating your company, and you'll be able to understand where the money is coming from and how to make more of it.

I've always focused on technology and growth and don't have the core competency to do liability management - I'm a mechanical engineer.

CEOs shouldn't worry about their budget all the time - on a day-to-day basis, they should work on managing their company, building an awesome product, developing key relationships, identifying distribution channels, etc.

There is a common and persistent belief out there that entrepreneurship is about creativity - that it's about having a great idea. But it's not, really. Entrepreneurship isn't about creativity. It's about organization-building - which, in turn, is about people.

As I looked across the company, there are three things that keep coming up that we need to work on: culture, our operating rigor, and capital allocation.

Economy consists in a due and proper application of the means afforded according to the ability of the employer and the situation chosen; care being taken that the expenditure is prudently conducted.

The main professional responsibility of a person in business is business.

I am not a retailer - I have never run a store; I have never understood the full details of how you can make a consumer satisfied. To build a company, to do deals, to motivate people: this is what I am able to do.

What I learned from Rockefeller that's off-the-hook important is: You need to know exactly where you stand in a business at all times. Measure everything, because everything that is measured and watched improves.