In business, words are words; explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality.

The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

Performance is your reality. Forget everything else.

I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them.

You can know a person by the kind of desk he keeps. If the president of a company has a clean desk then it must be the executive vice president who is doing all the work.

Management manages by making decisions and by seeing that those decisions are implemented.

Every company has two organizational structures: The formal one is written on the charts; the other is the everyday relationship of the men and women in the organization.

Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned.

It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises-but only performance is reality.

Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Nonperformance can always be explained away.

A true leader has to have a genuine open-door policy so that his people are not afraid to approach him for any reason.

In business, words are words; explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality.

You cannot run a business, or anything else, on a theory.

You can't run a business or anything else on a theory.

Management must manage!

Facts from paper are not the same as facts from people. The reliability of the people giving you the facts is as important as the facts themselves.

In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.

We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs.

It's better to take over and build upon an existing business than to start a new one.

If your desk isn't cluttered, you probably aren't doing your job.

I think it is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises - but only performance is reality.

It is much more difficult to measure nonperformance than performance.

The best way to inspire people to superior performance is to convince them by everything you do and by your everyday attitude that you are wholeheartedly supporting them.

He suffered from paralysis by analysis.

Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.

Uncertainty will always be part of the taking charge process.

Managers in all too many American companies do not achieve the desired results because nobody makes them do it.

The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success: Concentration, Discrimination, Organization, Innovation and Communication.

The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success: concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.

When I come upon a man who has a gleaming empty clear desktop I am dealing with a fellow who is so far removed from the realities of his business that someone else is running it for him

The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration discrimination organization innovation and communication.

Natural resources are so vast that no single individual or business is going to protect them; they don't have an incentive to.

The bronze powder business, however, no longer required my personal attention, and was well managed by those I had chosen as the guardians of a secret, which was long and honourably kept.

I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.

Howard Hughes himself was a regular at the restaurant, and in a way it became his headquarters, too. Howard had recently relocated to Las Vegas, so when he wanted to do business in Los Angeles, he went into the back of our restaurant to use the telephone.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

We mean by "politics" the people's business - the most important business there is.

Slovakia's joining the OECD in 1999 is totally dependent on meeting economic reforms required such as transparency and legislation that permits fair and open conduct of trade and business.

The way the business things work in Russia is you have to meet people, you have to go through a certain amount of etiquette and business things are done just simply by a shake of the hand and whether they like you or not.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

It costs a great deal of money to do a musical, and the more money involved, the more big business influences the artform.

It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself.

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

Chicago kept industry, attracted new business, became the center for convention trade and transportation.

I have been, and will go on, fighting that damnable, dirty, rotten business with all the power at my command.

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

I knew an actor's career goes up and down and back up again. Your standing in this business can't be your whole identity; otherwise, you're doomed.

The surest way to return to the people's business is to listen to the people themselves: We need to drop this whole scheme of federally controlled health care, start over, and work together on real reforms at the state level that will contain costs and won't leave America trillions of dollars deeper in debt.