A Quote by Steve Blank
You can get a good handle on a company's culture before you even get inside the building. For example, when companies say, 'We value our employees' but have reserved parking spots, a private cafeteria, and over-the-top offices for the executives, that tells you more than any PR spin.
Related Quotes
If you were charged with fixing the U.S. auto industry, how would you do it?
The guys who run the auto companies are out of touch with their customers and their employees. They ride to work in their limousines. They go up in their elevators and lock themselves in their offices. They don't walk out into the plants. They wouldn't even drive in the neighborhoods where their employees live. They give themselves big bonuses when the company isn't making any money. I'd make them get involved with the people who are building the cars. They've got to become real people.
What I'm trying to do is to create excitement. So people looking at the Bloomberg's office building say, "My goodness, what's going on here? There's something different about this company." You want the employees to get psyched. And it's a chance to meet each other. My job is to get people to work together. With free food and no offices, even for Bloomberg, this might be considered one of the world's great corporate headquarters.
When top executives get huge pay hikes at the same time as middle-level and hourly workers lose their jobs and retirement savings, or have to accept negligible pay raises and cuts in health and pension benefits, company morale plummets. I hear it all the time from employees: This company, they say, is being run only for the benefit of the people at the top. So why should we put in extra effort, commit extra hours, take on extra responsibilities? We'll do the minimum, even cut corners. This is often the death knell of a company.
I mean, I understand that because they're disadvantaged that they deserve their own parking spots, but do they have to make them so wide? I never understood how these people were allowed to drive cars but they get these really neat chairs with wheels and they're still not happy, so instead of parking their wheelchairs in the designated spots, they upstage us normal people and get the best parking spots with vehicles that are clearly too sophisticated for them to be handling. Still, you should smile at a cripple, because it's the only bit of happiness they'll ever have.
It takes a while for executives to understand that every company is a spatial company, fundamentally: where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales. But when they get it, they light up and say, 'I want to get the geographic advantage.'
Liability is being assessed against companies who inadvertently have shipped a virus to another company. Rather than risk the incredibly bad PR, these companies fork over.
Our focus is not on exit. In fact if you talk to any of my entrepreneurs, I'm generally saying, 'Don't sell the company,' when other investors want to sell. I'd much rather focus on building long-term value in building companies rather than worrying about exits.
The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, "Head for the hills!" the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn't make you a hero.
At my company, we have 300 employees spread across offices all over the world, and I send them all a voicemail each morning with a message from me about why our work is important and a reminder about one of our values. I call myself our company's 'chief spiritual officer.'
Do you ever just put your arms out and just spin and spin and spin? Well, that's what love is like; everything inside of you tells you to stop before you fall, but for some reason you just keep going.
With Virgin, I've just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.
Our company wouldn't exist and wouldn't be around without our warehouse employees and our call center employees. And these employees - not just at Rent the Runway but at tens of thousands of other companies throughout the country - are treated unequally.
Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.
For corporations to be bedfellows with the arts is good business for both. The architecture that houses a company is a more visible statement than the president's in the annual report. Ditto interiors, particularly of offices and sometimes, dramatically, in plants. For solvent businesses, support of community cultural undertakings in music, drama, dance creates great goodwill. Also, the existence of such activities is often important to the executives and their families that companies want to keep or attract to keep.
Similar to many multinational technology companies, Zoom has operations and employees in China. And like many multinational technology companies, our offices in China are operated by subsidiaries of the U.S. parent company. Our engineers are employed through these subsidiaries. We don't hide this.
I’ve seen how important this concept is in business. To be truly successful, companies need to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit. We try to follow that at salesforce.com, where we give 1% of our equity, 1% of our profits, and 1% of our employees’ time to the community. By integrating philanthropy into our business model our employees feel that they do much more than just work at our company. By sharing a common and important mission, we are united and focused, and have found a secret weapon that ensures we always win.
Related Authors
Bill Gates Quotes
American
Businessman
Charlie Munger Quotes
American
Businessman
Dieter F. Uchtdorf Quotes
German
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