Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.
A question like the present should he disposed of without undue delay. But a State cannot he expected to move with the celerity of a private business man; it is enough if it proceeds, in the language of the English Chancery, with all deliberate speed.
The “all deliberate speed” phrase later was used in Brown v. Board of Education, 1954.
Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing clear, I am not against communication. Quick one-on-ones can be extremely effective. I am talking about those hour-long recurring meetings, devoid of a clear agenda, and attended by many. I dread them.
There’s a mayor and a council and judges—a hundred men to deal with … and you can’t do business with a lot of officials, who check and cross one another and who come and go …. A business man wants to do business with one man.
America—not Britain—has a use for the telephone. Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys, and things of that kind.
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
After making a lot more films, I realized that the movie and TV business is, for all its inefficiencies, one of the best-run big businesses we have.
Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope.
The most precious resource for businesspeople is not their time. It's their energy. Manage it well.
There are basically no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only companies that have good fast decisions.
Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away.
To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.
Enterprise is better than ease.
AI is creating tremendous economic value today.
I think, at the end of the day, you have to reduce friction to businesses, ideally to zero, so that more and more entrepreneurs can create more and more jobs with higher and higher disposable income.
People in business understand paying money to be more efficient. You can bootstrap markets where the devices are too expensive at first because these are so valuable to some people.
A swarm of new business tools coming to phones and desktops near you promise to boost efficiency and streamline collaboration by borrowing social features from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
The more business one has, the more you are able to accomplish, for you learn to economize your time.
Your time as the entrepreneur is worth hundreds of dollars an hour. If you are doing tasks you could hire out, those are stopping you from earning that kind of money.
Dell's a company that has changed the IT landscape in making PCs and servers more affordable. There's enormous opportunities to make IT more accessible to tens of millions of companies, kind of democratizing the ability for companies to gain access to IT.
There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness.
If you get the best people on your team, you've got plenty of time to do the things you like to do and can add more value to.
When you take into public ownership a profitable industry the profits soon disappear. The goose that laid the golden eggs goes broody. State geese are not great layers.
Meetings should be like salt - a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.
It's critical to simplify and run the business in such a way that resources are released to invest in your main business.