I can’t afford to pay them any other way.
—Andrew Carnegie, when asked how he can afford to pay his employees so well
Any man who does not carry with him the value of all of the men around him does not carry the value to spend my time.
—J. P. Morgan
Mr. Morgan buys his partners; I grow my own.
—Andrew Carnegie, on J. P. Morgan’s practice of hiring associates who had already proved themselves elsewhere
Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed.
—Brian Tracy
I always like to refer managers in corporate America as the renters of the corporate assets, not the owners.
—Henry Kravis
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
—Sir Barnett Cocks
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
—Sir James Goldsmith
I surrounded myself with a lot of talent—legal talent, financial talent—to make sure that everything we did, was and looked and smelled proper and correct.
—Ronald Perelman
I always felt that our people came first. Some of the business schools regarded that as a conundrum. They would say: Which comes first, your people, your customers, or your shareholders? And I would say, it’s not a conundrum. Your people come first, and if you treat them right, they’ll treat the customers right, and the customers will come back, and that’ll make the shareholders happy.
—Herb Kelleher
I think my most important job in IBM is working with anybody who has a problem.
—Thomas Watson, Jr.
Working with great people who make it happen, and seeing the results.
—Wayne Huizenga, on the only thing that motivates him
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.
—Sam Walton
In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example—and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.
—Rupert Murdoch
If you have lower than a 10 percent turnover, there is a problem. And if you have higher than, say 20 percent, there is a problem.
—William McGovern
I want people who will stand up to me. People who are not afraid to say exactly what’s on their minds, even though that’s probably not what I want to hear. That’s what I want.
—Henry Kravis
I think you have to work with people, and when I talk about managing relationships, don’t think the derogatory “managed relationships.” It is a question of sharing emotion and feelings. The common denominator of everything can’t be money, and it should not be money.
—Anil Ambani
Play off everyone against each other so that you have more avenues of action open to you.
—Howard Hughes
Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.
—Walter Chrysler
I have no use for men who fail. The cause of their failure is no business of mine, but I want successful men as my associates.
—John D. Rockefeller
These great guys who ran corporate businesses in New York ... they’d ask me what our greatest competitive advantage was with Kinko’s, and I said it was a spark in our workers’ eyes. And they didn’t realize that.
—Paul Orfalea
I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.
—Robert Bosch
The people in the middle are my employees, and if they’re not aligned to those customers, then it is my job to make them aligned. A lot of times middle managers take their eyes off the ball, which is to take care of their customers and workers.
—Paul Orfalea
Our “People, Service, Profit” philosophy insists that our people be treated fairly. If we give good service and we come up with a reasonable profit, we make that a good deal for our employees, with profit sharing, promotions, complaint procedures.
—Frederick W. Smith
The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.
—J. Paul Getty
In all my years in business I can recall very few people I have wanted to fire for making mistakes.
—Akio Morita
Good personnel will work for a competent manager. Go to every length to find, hire, and train good employees and treat them like your family. This is the crux of your whole operation.
—J. Willard Marriott
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
—Sam Walton
If warehouse managers know that their own regional bosses have open door policies and will talk to any employees about their issues, then they are going to be a little faster to talk to the troubled employees themselves. They don’t want the problems to come back to them through their bosses.
—Jim Sinegal
Compromise is usually bad. It should be a last resort. If two departments or divisions have a problem they can’t solve and it comes up to you, listen to both sides and then pick one or the other. This places solid accountability on the winner to make it work. Condition your people to avoid compromise.
—Robert Townsend
First of all, if you come here, you’ll be happy. And No. 2, if you come here, you’ll be the most highly compensated employee in the airline industry. Not compensated the way other airlines compensate people, but when you put it all together, why do you care?
—Herb Kelleher
The five steps in teaching an employee new skills are preparation, explanation, showing, observation and supervision.
—Harold Hook
If you can’t finish this job today, maybe I can’t sign your check on payday.
—John Johnson
I established the rule that once we hire an employee, his schools records are a matter of the past, and are no longer used to evaluate his work or decide on his promotion.
—Akio Morita
We don’t have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.
—Larry Page
I make more money than my competition who pays 50 cents an hour because of the efficiencies of dealing with someone face to face and paying them a fair wage.
—Dov Charney
If the frontline people do count, you couldn’t prove it by examining the reward systems in most organizations.
—Karl Albrecht
If you don’t know what to do with many of the papers piled on your desk, stick a dozen colleagues’ initials on them and pass them along. When in doubt, route.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
If we hire people who are smaller than we are, we will become a company of dwarfs. If we hire people who are larger than we are, we’ll become a company of giants.
—David Ogilvy
Businesses are all relationships, based on common values, values such as staying true to your word. Every religion also enshrines those values, so you can have different religious beliefs, but underlying those beliefs, you’ve got people who must have similar values, and can work together.
—Issy Sharp
Failure to delegate is the biggest single obstacle to job performance in IBM.
—Thomas Watson, Jr.
Our company is built on people—those who work for us, and those we do business with.
—Harvey S. Firestone
I would rather earn 1% off 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.
—John D. Rockefeller
One of the hallmarks of Onex is that since I started the company in 1983, every professional who has joined the company at our Toronto head office is still here. We’ve had no turnover.
—Gerald W. Schwartz
Anytime you’re in a pressure situation, you find out who’s going to step up and do it and who’s going to fade into the background.
—Eric Schmidt
When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are.
—R. H. Grant
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
—Bill Gates
A man is known by the company he keeps. A company is known by the men it keeps.
—Thomas Watson
If you want to give a man credit, put it in writing. If you want to give him hell, do it on the phone.
—Charles Beecham
I was once an employee myself, so I know what employees want.
—Li Ka-shing
It’s not necessary to be so structured in this world. With all the people who work here, whether you are real structured or not, it is not going to affect how much work they do. People have inside of them a certain work ethic, and, if you appeal to them nicely, they’ll respond and give all they can give.
—Fred DeLuca
We have a culture that allows us to change without threatening the people that work at the company.
—Frederick W. Smith
It was my philosophy to treat the franchise owners as partners.
—Ron Joyce
When you are dealing with employees, you are dealing with a total person—the whole enchilada of the worker. A worker might have a problem with her husband, but you’ve still got to get a smile on her face. That’s your problem. When workers have mood problems because they’ve got baggage, that’s your problem.
—Paul Orfalea
We hire on requirement basis and not on anticipation.
—Azim Premji
There is an old saying that when you talk—you teach, when you listen—you learn. There are a lot of ideas worth listening to in this company. Let’s be sure we’re paying attention. We are never so rich in ideas that we can afford not to.
—Thomas Watson, Jr.
You never really hear the truth from your subordinates until after ten in the evening.
—Jurgen Schrempp
To succeed as a team is to hold all of the members accountable for their expertise.
—Mitchell Caplan
Sandwich every bit of criticism between two thick layers of praise.
—Mary Kay Ash
We will ensure that associates continue to possess unsurpassed product knowledge and maintain their dedication to customer service and respect for their colleagues and for the communities in which they work and live.
—Arthur Blank
It doesn’t matter to me if a man is from Harvard or Sing Sing. We hire the man, not his history.
—Henry Ford
Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.
—Malcolm S. Forbes
The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
—John D. Rockefeller
A businessman once said, “A business succeeds not because it is long established or because it is big, but because there are men and women in it who live it, sleep it, dream it, and build great future plans for it.”
—J. Willard Marriott
I love the ability to work with very good managers, and to provide the right incentives for them, and truly become a partner with that management, and make that management take a long view.
—Henry Kravis
I’ve heard that some coaches face a curious dilemma. The world-class athletes on their teams—the players with the best skills and experience—sometimes falter when it comes to crunch time. Occasionally, though, there’s a player on the team, a blue-collar guy whose skills and training are not quite world-class. Yet at crunch time, he’s the one the coach sends out to the field. He’s so driven and so hungry to win that he can outperform the top athletes when it really matters.
—Howard Schultz
One of the managers in our People Department once said, “The important thing is to take the bricklayer and make him understand that he’s building a home, not just laying bricks.” So we take the building-a-home approach: This is what you’re doing not only for yourself but for society: giving people who’d otherwise not be able to travel the opportunity to do so.
—Herb Kelleher
I can walk through the front door of any factory and out the back and tell you if it’s making money or not. I can just tell by the way it’s being run and by the spirit of the workers.
—Harvey S. Firestone
I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them. And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.
—Henry J. Kaiser
I’ve got America’s best writer for $300 a week.
—Jack L. Warner
People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.
—Mary Kay Ash
Somehow, despite the greatest differences in temperaments and even in interests, somehow we had to work together. We were an organization. At the center of our lives—our job, our function—at that point everything we had belonged to each other.
—Henry R. Luce
To be at the top we get service standards down to the bottom of the pyramid, and that process begins for us with our hiring policy. We hire for attitude. We want people who like other people and are, therefore, more motivated to serve them. Competence we can teach. Attitude is ingrained.
—Issy Sharp
I figure that my staff will be less reluctant to work overtime if I work longer hours than they do.
—David Ogilvy
If you don’t understand it, how do you expect me to understand it?
—John Johnson
You know the face of your worker ... engineers and designers and finance people and knitters and dyers and chemists can come together in one location and say, “How can we do this better?” You can produce products more efficiently than they can be made on an outsource basis.
—Dov Charney
The golden rule of Domino’s: Treat people as you want to be treated. I don’t believe that in 38 years that I treated anyone unfairly. That may not be true, but as far as I know it is.
—Tom Monaghan
It’s better to get smart than to get mad. I try not to get so insulted that I will not take advantage of an opportunity to persuade people to change their minds.
—John Johnson
We have a good many MBAs, but we look at them for attitude as well. We will hire someone with less experience, less education, and less expertise, than someone who has more of those things and has a rotten attitude. Because we can train people. We can teach people how to lead. We can teach people how to provide customer service. But we can’t change their DNA.
—Herb Kelleher
I’m looking for people who are bright, have the highest ethical standards, will not compromise one iota for that.
—Henry Kravis
A customer is the most important person ever in this office—in person or by mail.
—Leon Leonwood Bean