Harold S. Geneen Quotes

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.

The thing that I learned early on is you really need to set goals in your life, both short-term and long-term, just like you do in business. Having that long-term goal will enable you to have a plan on how to achieve it.

Without a plan, even the most brilliant business can get lost. You need to have goals, create milestones and have a strategy in place to set yourself up for success.

Show me any top entertainer or top business executive, and I'll show you a guy who has mapped out his life from the very start.

In business, there's a constant focus on developing strategies, reviewing executive performance against those strategies each year, engaging with opposing or different points of view, and having intellectual dialogue.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

I think a good entrepreneur has a very clear grasp of what the goal is, an unwavering sense of the goal, an utterly agile approach of getting there.

You have got to have discipline and focus - on the customer and how you run the business.

Never forget this simple truism: Forecasting is marketing, plain and simple.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

We haven't rushed to set up targets, either in business or in football. Our goal was to understand how to act and then to move gradually.

Being a Navy SEAL and sniper taught me all about risk management. Take away all the risk variables under your control and reduce it to an acceptable level. The same fundamentals apply in business.

Keeping a little ahead of conditions is one of the secrets of business; the trailer seldom goes far.

Hope is not strategy. Hope fits with vision, but we must have a strategy and a process to make our vision become a reality.

If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.

Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.

Data is great, but strategy is better

Drive your business. Let not your business drive you.

Hope is not a strategy.

...." I was rather discouraged when I discovered that Paul and Hotch had no marketing survey, no business plan, no budget, no organized strategy for the introduction of the sauce. When asked about this lack of preparation, the haphazard nature of their business, Paul said, 'Me in this business is just part of life's great folly. Stay loose, men, keep 'em off balance.'"

...it's the same with business. If you focus on the goal and not the process, you inevitably compromise. Businessmen who focus on profits wind up in the hole. For me, profit is what happens when you do everything else right.

We may be very busy, we may be very 'efficient', but we will also be truly 'effective' only when we begin with the end in mind.

Drive thy business or it will drive thee.

All strategy depends on competition.