Steve Blank Quotes

The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.

I've had people ask me whether I'm concerned about wearing makeup into a match, for example. One year, an on-court commentator asked one of the girls to twirl after the match. Surely, he's not going to go up to a man to ask, 'Can you do a spin for us?'

When I first started, it was so male-heavy, so male-dominated, that on the 18th floor of the criminal courts building, which was where I worked, there were three men's bathrooms and only one women's bathroom.

When you work in film sets, when you're working on projects that are male dominated, you are always treated as the last priority.

We do not talk enough about spirit in business, yet it is what moves employees, customers, and shareholders alike.

We're not too top heavy with executives. I don't have to check with New York or L.A. My crew walks in, we talk about something, and either we do it or we don't. There's not a long, drawn out process.

If I didn't love acting, I would love to work at Google... if they'd have me. They have the coolest perks a workplace can have.

You don't want a second-class set of citizens inside the United States.

Everything in politics is so stage-managed.

We do believe in an inside-out culture. If we hold our hosts and guests to an expectation of acceptance and belonging, it has to start within our company. Otherwise, how on earth do we have the credibility to hold them accountable if we're not doing it to ourselves?

LVMH is not just about numbers. It's about people.

It is tough for an actress to raise her voice on sexual harassment because the chances are they will question your character, they will ruin your career, and they will defeat you in the power game. So one has to be very strong to fight against these white-collar mafias.

That's an interesting thing about an object. One object speaks volumes about the company that produced it and its values and priorities.

Who we are, not just the services and products we provide, creates money.

I have these meetings with really powerful men and they ask me all the time, 'Where are your kids? Are your kids here?' It's such a weird question. Never in a million years do I ask guys where their kids are. It would be comparable to me going to a guy, 'Do you feel like you see your kids enough?'

While our managers debated what steps to take to address the sales and cash-flow crisis, I began to lead week-long employee seminars in what we called Philosophies. We'd take a busload at a time to places like Yosemite or the Marin Headlands above San Francisco, camp out, and gather under the trees to talk. The goal was to teach every employee in the company our business and environmental ethics and values.

Good customer service begins at the top. If your senior people don't get it, even the strongest links further down the line can become compromised.

Great companies connect to the heartstrings of their employees to make their purposes known.

What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.

The spinning wheel for us is the foundation for all public corporate life.

It was always amusing to be inside Apple and read what journalists said we were doing

Bell Labs Cafeteria, New York, 1943: His high pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."

That business aspect of the media, that Charlotte Street world, the advertising and programme executives, it leaves me absolutely cold. I'm supposed to be the director of a television company, but I've only ever seen that company as a vehicle for making the kind of programmes we wanted to make, getting our ideas on the screen.

Corporate men and women, once divided by striking differences in opportunity for career growth, have come to share career chaos.

On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.