Quotes About Great Companies

#1. Great companies are formed by great people. It's not about attracting great people; it's about retaining them.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#2. Great companies first build a culture of discipline . . . and create a business model that fits squarely in the intersection of three circles: what they can be best in the world at, a deep understanding of their economic engine, and the core values they hold with deep passion.

Isadore Sharp

#3. Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.

Steve Ballmer

#4. Great companies don't throw money at problems, they throw ideas at problems.

Greg McAdoo

#5. Enduring great companies don't exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.

James C. Collins

#6. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

John Steinbeck

#7. The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.

Benjamin Graham

#8. I have realised more and more that great companies, founded for a long-term purpose, such as Google or Facebook or SpaceX, may do more good in the world than any other vehicle that we have.

Luke Nosek

#9. The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money.

Guy Kawasaki

#10. We really think highly of the executives at SBC. And Microsoft is one of the great companies of the 21st century. It is in all of our best interests to work together. In this new wave of technology, you can't do it all yourself; you have to form alliances.

Carlos Slim

#11. Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don't see.

Peter Thiel

#12. A market downturn, doesn't bother us. For us and our long term investors, it is an opportunity to increase our ownership of great companies with great management at good prices. Only for short term investors and market timers is a correction not an opportunity.

Warren Buffett

#13. In determing "the right people," the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience.

James C. Collins

#14. Companies are bought for their revenue, customer base, technology, or people. A few great companies offer all of these, but any valuable business offers one.

Margaret Heffernan

#15. You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

Sam Altman

#16. The origins of great companies inevitably start with the ideas and enterprise of great men.

Bill Scott

#17. Great companies have been reduced by hiring executives that don't work out.

Dylan Smith

#18. Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.

Steve Ballmer

#19. Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.

Andy Grove

#20. All the old great companies were run by guys who knew what an animator meant, and guys who knew how to draw. All the companies today are run by executives.

Ralph Bakshi

#21. Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people.

James C. Collins

#22. You don't know this when you're young, but over time, you see that great companies are usually built at a special point in time.

David Duffield

#23. The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.

Fred Wilson

#24. You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated in accordance with this principle, and the comparison companies generally did not.

James C. Collins

#25. Great companies make meaning. A company has a name, but its people give it meaning.

Richard Pascale

#26. The essence of business to me is great people run great companies. Mediocre people don't do a very good job.

Kenneth Langone

#27. In general, great companies prefer to grow 'organically,' as Wall Street likes to say. That is, from the inside out, by finding new markets or by taking market share from their competitors.

Alex Berenson

#28. great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses

Brad Stone

#29. AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.

Sam Altman

#30. The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They don't just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didn't know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, 'I must have it.'

Eric Schmidt

#31. Asana and complementary services are bringing the evolved team brain to the entire world. In great companies like Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, people already add information to and extract insight from these systems much the same way our hands and brain exchange signals.

Justin Rosenstein

#32. Good companies will meet needs; great companies will create markets.

Philip Kotler

#33. Individuals don't build great companies, teams do.

Mark Suster

#34. It may seem odd to talk about something as soft and fuzzy as "passion" as an integral part of a strategic framework. But throughout the good-to-great companies, passion became a key part of the Hedgehog Concept.

James C. Collins

#35. Great companies with the way they work, first start with great leaders.

Steve Ballmer

#36. Great companies that build an enduring brand have an emotional relationship with customers that has no barrier. And that emotional relationship is on the most important characteristic, which is trust.

Howard Schultz

#37. We really wake up every day trying to build businesses. That is the goal of private equity. It's a misnomer out there that private equity profits by shrinking companies. In fact, it's just the opposite. Private equity creates value by growing great companies.

Stephen Pagliuca

#38. When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.

Ben Horowitz

#39. If you buy something because it's undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That's hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That's a good thing.

Charlie Munger

#40. Great companies are built on great products.

Elon Musk

#41. Our country is a place where hope can be born and great companies, organizations and non-profits can spring up from an idea birthed on the back of a coffee-shop napkin.

Todd Stocker

#42. Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.

Charlie Munger

#43. Great companies don't just have one founding moment. They have many founding moments.

Jack Dorsey

#44. I chase a little white ball around and work on my farmer tan, that's about it. I think that I've been lucky enough to represent some great companies, and I think maybe that's what it is.

Tiger Woods

#45. Great companies start because the founders want to change the world ... not make a fast buck.

Guy Kawasaki

#46. A tremendous chief executive in a small market will never be great. All great companies start with great markets.

Douglas Leone

#47. Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first ... at least 100 employees and often many more.

Sam Altman

#48. Good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding; comparison companies set their goals and strategies based on bravado.

James C. Collins

#49. Call me idealistic, but the genesis of great companies is answering simple questions that change the world, not the desire to become rich.

Guy Kawasaki

#50. Great companies foster a productive tension between continuity and change.

James C. Collins

#51. even great companies are imperiled if they miss a market transition - and

Anonymous

#52. Great companies are defined by their discipline and their understanding of who they are and who they are not.

Howard Schultz

#53. Great companies are built by people who never stop thinking about ways to improve the business.

J. Willard Marriott

#54. I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay.

Steve Jobs

#55. If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation.

James C. Collins

#56. Overall, a portfolio of the "good to great" companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.

Steven D. Levitt

#57. Great companies don't hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them.

Simon Sinek

#58. The great companies get built by their founders

Marc Andreessen

#59. Truly great companies are built on ideals, not just deals.

Alan Watts

#60. Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be misappraised.

Warren Buffett

#61. The successful companies try to keep the new entrants down. Now that's great for a company like ours. We make more money that way because we have less competition and less innovation. But for the country as a whole, it's horrible.

Charles Koch

#62. Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out.

Steve Jobs

#63. I met a lot of hackers, and some of them were very arrogant. They thought I was stupid because I couldn't follow what they were talking about. But then I met this great guy whom companies hire to find their security holes, and he was very good about explaining so I could understand.

David Lagercrantz

#64. There would really be no reason to get up in the morning if Founders Fund was not willing to invest in companies that were doing important things, great businesses that very few people believe in.

Luke Nosek

#65. One of Job's great strengths was knowing how to focus. " Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do, " he said. " That's true for companies, and it's true for products.

Walter Isaacson

#66. Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.

Warren G. Bennis

#67. Innovation is this amazing intersection between someone's imagination and the reality in which they live. The problem is, many companies don't have great imagination, but their view of reality tells them that it's impossible to do what they imagine.

Ron Johnson

#68. And yes, it is harder to make movies because budgets are getting smaller, and the companies stocks are down. The only good news on the horizon is that box office has been up by something like 23% from last year, which is great for us. It's still the cheapest form of entertainment.

Jerry Bruckheimer

#69. Great opportunity for technology/media companies to meet the movers and shakers in the broadcast and media industries.

Kay Koplovitz

#70. Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.

Jan Koum

#71. Once you have created some great technology, there remains the problem of effectively transferring it to the development organization," Myhrvold wrote. "Failure to do this effectively is a primary reason that research work is ineffective at many companies.

Anonymous

#72. A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes.

Edmund Phelps

#73. The early part of my career was the 1990s, and I was living in New York working as an actor. It was the world I was in. A lot of companies had a great deal of money.

Gaby Hoffmann

#74. Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.

Joel Spolsky

#75. Consumers no longer want only a great product - they want to buy products from companies that align with their own character and values.

Muhtar Kent

#76. If the people aren't looking out for the community, then the benefits of a community erode. Many companies have star employees and star salesmen and so on, but few have a culture that produces great people as a rule and not an exception.

Simon Sinek

#77. Indeed, if there is any one "secret" to an enduring great company, it is the ability to manage continuity and change - a discipline that must be consciously practiced, even by the most visionary of companies.

James C. Collins

#78. Competition is a great thing and critically important in any industry. I respect the companies that build their brand through innovation/great product, packaging, sharp marketing and clever ideas.

John Robinson

#79. Getting service right is more than just a nice to do; it's a must do. American consumers are willing to spend more with companies that provide outstanding service - ultimately, great service can drive sales and customer loyalty.

Jim Bush

#80. You have record companies that sign acts that they think are great, and then they never do anything. Acts that they don't think are really going to do much end up having a career. I don't think anyone really knows what it is that drives somebody to get on their computer and want to download a song.

Jason Aldean

#81. Entrepreneurs have a great ability to create change, be flexible, build companies and cultivate the kind of work environment in which they want to work.

Tory Burch

#82. One thing that has happened is a revolution in digital consumer recording, and overall, that's a great thing for art, but parallel to that there's been a revolution in boutique audio companies making excellent gear.

John Vanderslice

#83. An MBA is a great degree for career paths like investment banking, finance, consulting, and large companies. An MBA is not necessarily the right path for starting a tech company. You should be building a prototype, not getting an MBA in that case.

Guy Kawasaki

#84. I'm a great believer in new technology and I think new technology is very scary for newspaper companies.

James Packer

#85. The most important thing for us is investing and making companies great, and then they have all the options they want, whether that's to go public or stay private.

David Sze

#86. I'm an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.

Bill Gates

#87. Broadband companies can have great success offering access to the unfettered Internet.

Marvin Ammori

#88. In talking to founder after founder; I've heard almost visceral reactions to working for companies, even very cool ones with great things to work on and lots of opportunity, like Facebook, Google, or consulting firms.

Maynard Webb

#89. My concern is the really great concepts that are features, not companies. There isn't enough advertising to support all those features, and in compression times, advertisers tend to flock to safe names and sites that have real traction.

Ross Levinsohn

#90. Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with going from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often.

James C. Collins

#91. Companies like Pinterest and Twitter did not become sensations because of Google search but because of the many ways users find out about great sites.

Marvin Ammori

#92. For most Indians in America, wealth is not inherited. Neither do we make it as heads of large hedge funds and private equity funds. For us to make it to the top, we have to use our knowhow to create great new technology products and build high-tech companies.

Romesh Wadhwani

#93. We are happy to get great technology from anywhere, and we have eyes and ears that are checking out companies all over.

Henry Samueli

#94. I hear my own daughters talking about big companies polluting the environment, and then I realise they are talking about companies of which one I am running. But when I tell them to read the things we are doing, then they realise we are doing good things. But millennials are really a great lot.

Indra Nooyi

#95. Our primary goal in the consumer health service companies I back is helping them create an uncompromisingly great consumer experience.

John Sculley

#96. How friendly are your companies' first words? Just try this ... start all conversations with customers using one of the following words or phrases: 'great!' 'no problem', 'you're in luck', 'that's my favorite problem'.

Jeffrey Gitomer

#97. I don't think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.

Ron Chernow

#98. Do not presume global competitiveness from any feature of society in Silicon Valley, save those which are directly related to building great tech companies.

Anonymous

#99. One of the great dilemmas for America will be that American companies will do very well while American workers might not.

Fareed Zakaria

#100. The great personal fortunes in the country weren't built on a portfolio of fifty companies. They were built by someone who identified one wonderful business. With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least 10% of your net worth in that stock.

Warren Buffett