A Quote by Charlie Munger
Our biggest mistakes, were things we didn't do, companies we didn't buy.
Related Quotes
Venture capitalists buy minority positions in young companies they think will grow quickly; buy-out investors buy most or all of companies they think can be turned around by fixing a few basic things.
We've been trained to spend money since we were born with all these commercials with toys and G.I. Joes and Transformers. But there's so many things in the supermarket, there's so many things on television that automatically, when you turn it on, are saying, 'Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy!'
The measure of a man cannot be whether he ever makes mistakes, because he will make mistakes. It's what he does in response to his mistakes. The same is true of companies. We have to apologize, we have to fix the problem, and we have to learn from our mistakes.
When the trust is high, you get the trust dividend. Investors invest in brands people trust. Consumers buy more from companies they trust, they spend more with companies they trust, they recommend companies they trust, and they give companies they trust the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong.
Imagine if the pension funds and endowments that own much of the equity in our financial services companies demanded that those companies revisit the way mortgages were marketed to those without adequate skills to understand the products they were being sold. Management would have to change the way things were done.
The biggest part of our business has always been moving things, not paper. With the Internet, people in Mississippi can buy things from Macedonia, without regard to time or place or quantity.
But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.
We buy our way out of jail but we can't buy freedom,
We buy a lot of clothes when we don't really need them,
Things we buy to cover up what's inside.
If you think about companies that were built in Silicon Valley, a lot of them early on were chip companies. And now the companies that are there, like Apple, are much more successful than any of the chip companies were.
My plea is that as we continue our search for truth, particularly we of the Church, that we look for strength and goodness rather than weakness and failings in those who did so great a work in their time. We recognize that our forefathers were human. They doubtless made mistakes. Some of them acknowledged making mistakes. But the mistakes were minor when compared with the marvelous work which they accomplished.
When you look at a company like Amazon, one of the reasons that Amazon is one of the most powerful companies in the world is because we want to buy cheap stuff. If Donald Trump were to change trade laws, we couldn't buy the cheap stuff or in our Wal-Marts, they would cost a whole lot more.
Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.
I buy companies I want to own. I buy companies that make a lot of money, that don't have a lot of debt, and that I can understand.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is brute force lead generation - "give me more leads!" -when they don't understand that not all leads are the same.
The galleries are full of critics. They play no ball, they fight no fights. They make no mistakes because they attempt nothing. Down in the arena are the doers. They make mistakes because they try many things. The man who makes no mistakes lacks boldness and the spirit of adventure. He is the one who never tries anything. His is the brake on the wheel of progress. And yet it cannot be truly said he makes no mistakes, because his biggest mistake is the very fact that he tries nothing, does nothing, except criticize those who do things.
My mistakes made were learning how to work with different groups of people. I mean, I went to school at Berkeley, which is a pretty diverse group, but working in a professional setting, I hadn't really done that before and learning about office politics, learning about interactions between different people and I made a lot of mistakes there during my time as a young person. I was 19 or 20 at the time. So, I would say those were my biggest career mistakes, but fortunately they were made in the context of an engineering co-op program and not in a professional field.
Related Authors
Bill Gates Quotes
American
Businessman
Dieter F. Uchtdorf Quotes
German
Businessman
Elon Musk Quotes
South African
Businessman
Henry Ford Quotes
American
Businessman
Jim Rohn Quotes
American
Businessman
Joseph B. Wirthlin Quotes
American
Businessman
Mark Cuban Quotes
American
Businessman
Mark Zuckerberg Quotes
American
Businessman
Peter Drucker Quotes
American
Businessman
Richard Branson Quotes
British
Businessman
Russell Simmons Quotes
American
Businessman
Sam Altman Quotes
American
Businessman
Steve Jobs Quotes
American
Businessman
Tom Peters Quotes
American
Businessman
Walt Disney Quotes
American
Businessman
Warren Buffett Quotes
American
Businessman