Letitia Baldrige Quotes

I'd be bored to death if I spent all my time with other businesspeople, bankers and lawyers.

Quite frankly, I am not very comfortable in chitchat. When I go to board meetings, I arrive two minutes before and leave when it's over. I don't stay for lunch or go early and have coffee.

Be honest: if your pitch is 90 minutes and you only have 60 set aside for a business lunch or a cup of coffee, there is no way that you can give an honest representation of your company or products. You're lying to yourself and wasting your own time as well as that of your prospect or partner.

I would come to New York, work, and then get out of New York. I didn't go out to dinner with other people on the Management Committee. I didn't socialize. I didn't politick.

I work in the film business, where schmoozing is an art form, lunch hour lasts from 12:30 until 3, and every meeting takes an hour whether there's an hour's worth of business or not.

Western business people often don't get the importance of establishing human relationships.

The last thing businessmen want to do is sit in a room filled with other businessmen. A room full of money is a pretty boring sight - unless it's yours, of course.

Well, my closest friends are still the ones that I went to school with, but it's nice to go to work, at the studios, and have people there that you're willing to talk to and have a good conversation with.

In the barbershop, there's democracy. You're a professor; you're an engineer; you're a garbage man, have at it. You got something to say, get down with it.

So, there's like one luxury you take and since we do that, y'know, you're involved with people in suits; business people all the time. But hey, if I sit down on a bar and they leave, good for me.

I won't be making any friends in the corporate suites.

Tyra the businesswoman is very close to - and I hate third person, but you said it, oh, chiiild, you said it - but me the businessperson and me the person: very similar. I can be in a business meeting and be all 'Wooo!' and 'Oh, child!' and still be talking revenues and profits and cash flows.

I met Mr. Hoover socially. I never talked to him about anything connected with his work. We just met him.

I'm an afternoon tea type of girl. I come from a Russian background where we love our teas. So between lunch and dinner after training I come home and I love a nice cup of tea with jam in it, as we drink it there. Black English Breakfast with raspberry jam is my favorite.

I don't go on lunch dates with friends. I hear about people having dinner parties, but I never do that. I'm not really human.

A lot of business can be accomplished in the state dinners.

The story about GE that hasn't been told is the value of an informal place. I think it's a big thought. I don't think people have ever figured out that being informal is a big deal.

A dinner lubricates business.

Most people view coffee and lunch as personal time, not deal-making time. Unless the person you're meeting understands that this is a working lunch, then they may not even think that this is a serious business conversation.

When it comes down to business, everybody is very businesslike... I have never felt any difficulty in dealing with any of these situations.

It's hard to make friends as an adult. You gotta work at it, you know? You have to ask people to lunch, and if you don't know them, it's weird.

In New York, you collect a thousand encounters a year, a passel of handshakes, a zillion air-kisses, and boatloads of business cards that you pitch into your purse and eventually deposit your chewing gum into. Amid this break-neck montage of glancing contacts, I'm tormented by the constant thrumming fear of being fingered as a flake.

In a perfect world, if I can get conversations done at a batting cage, there's exactly the place I want to be.

I quite like to, y'know, chill and catch a vibe where you can actually talk, as opposed to standing on the floor in the club.

I couldn't live without tea. I have two cups in the morning, one at lunch, two in the afternoon and one in the evening - Assam with milk and sugar. It has to be leaf tea - no bags - and drunk from a china cup.