Business Conflict Quotes

The story started over a decade ago when I ran Hermitage Capital Management, the largest investment firm in Russia. I was very successful, but when I started to complain publicly about corruption at the companies in which my fund invested, President Vladimir Putin had me expelled from the country and declared a threat to national security.

In the best of circumstances, the Trump family business and questions about conflicts will be a burden to his presidency. There is no off-the-shelf ethics plan that would cover every possible conflict.

All forms of commerce are adversarial.

My experience with being on a record label over the years has been when both of your agendas are in sync, and they're the same goal, it's great to have another army of people and resources and money. But most of the time, they're not the same. Their agenda is just simply to sell plastic discs at any cost, and yours is to preserve - at least in my case - your integrity, and hopefully sell some plastic discs, too.

I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.

I came to understand that the words executive and corporate never belong next to the word chef.

If a startup stays in Microsoft, it does not have a chance, because all it tries to do goes against what Microsoft is about.

I love to work. It's the idea of having someone else tell you how to make your film or how to sell it - that's the part I can't really deal with. I would rather do 1,000 things that are work than deal with one thing that's a political problem.

For example, if you are a blogger who wrote something about a local official and you're going to prison for that, you're a political prisoner. If you're a businessman who has refused to cede his business to the local official and you're going to prison for that, you're not a political prisoner. In that second category there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia.

War buddies don't exist in the meeting room. It's a battle between a lot of different officers. Some continue fighting when they don't realize that they have been shot.

I did a filmstrip on pollution in the Davison area as my Eagle Scout project and showed it around town. Businesses who were the polluters were mad at me.

If you want to devote yourself to the arts, you'd better do it strictly from passion, because there is zero guarantee that you'll get anywhere. The hardest thing is dealing with business people who have nothing to do with your art. They could care less that you're up at 4:30 in the morning writing a joke. Don't expect any sympathy from anybody.

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray-that you are worn down by the threat.

The conflict between the policies of the administration and the desires of the financiers of big business is an irreconcilable one. Concessions to the big business interests must, in the end, prove futile.

Most of the media... is positioning the merger with Compaq and the recent actions by Walter Hewlett and David Packard as a fight between the past and the future.

I love stirring the pot. I love giving big companies a run for their money - especially if they're offering expensive, poor-quality products.

Climbing Everest is so big now, with so much money involved, and the Sherpas are not stupid. They see this, and they want to take over the business and kick out the westerners. This is a big fight.