Lee Iacocca Quotes

So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late. - Lee Iacocca

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.

My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, then you've had a great life.

In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.

We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluable problems.

Sometimes you just don't like somebody

Get all the education you can then go out and do something - do anything.

No matter what you've done for yourself or for humanity, if you can't look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?

Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then...do something. Don't just stand there, make it happen.

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo?

The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.

I’ve always felt that a manager has achieved a great deal when he’s able to motivate one other person. When it comes to making the place run, motivation is everything. You might be able to do the work of two people, but you can’t be two people. Instead, you have to inspire the next guy down the line and get him to inspire his people.

It's a good thing god doesn't let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself.

In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.” – Lee Iacocca

It’s a good thing God doesn’t let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself. But He’s a charitable Lord: He only lets you see one day at a time. When times get tough, there’s no choice except to take a deep breath, carry on, and do the best you can.

When the product is right, you don't have to be a great marketer.

CEOs face this choice all the time. Should they confront their shortcomings or should they create a world where they have none? Lee Iacocca chose the latter. He surrounded himself with worshipers, exiled the critics—and quickly lost touch with where his field was going. Lee Iacocca had become a nonlearner.

I always kept in mind my father’s warning: “If he’s bigger than you are, don’t fight back. Use your head instead of your fists.

We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need? -Lee Iacocca, former chairman, Ford Motor Company

In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. People come first. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.

Formal learning can teach you a great deal, but many of the essential skills in life are the ones you have to develop on your own.

If I had to sum up in one word the qualities that make a good manager, I’d say that it all comes down to decisiveness.

Although I was never a candidate, I learned a lot from all the presidential talk. Shortly after the whole business began, I was having a conversation with a guy in advertising. He said something interesting: “I’ve decided why everybody talks about you as a presidential candidate. It’s very simple. They don’t believe anybody anymore. You talk to them and you make them believe that you stand for something and then you pursue it. You don’t bullshit them, and the American public has been bullshitted too often.

Business leadership is based on two elements: vision and technical competence. Top people in a given industry always embody at least one of those two elements. Sometimes, but rarely, they embody both of them. Simply put, vision is the ability to see what other people don’t. It’s a Ford executive named Lee Iacocca realizing that a market existed for an automobile that was both a racing car and a street vehicle—and coming up with the Mustang. It’s Steven Jobs realizing that computers needed to be sold in a single box, like a television sets, instead of piece by piece. About one hundred years ago, Walter Chrysler was a plant manager for a locomotive company. Then he decided to go into the car business, which was a hot new industry at the time. The trouble was, Walter Chrysler didn’t know a lot about cars, except that they were beginning to outnumber horses on the public roadways. To remedy this problem, Chrysler bought one of the Model T Fords that were becoming so popular. To learn how it worked, he took it apart and put it back together. Then, just to be sure he understood everything, he repeated this. Then, to be absolutely certain he knew what made a car work, he took it apart and put it together forty-eight more times, for a grand total of fifty. By the time he was finished, Chrysler not only had a vision of thousands of cars on American highways, he also had the mechanical details of those cars engraved in his consciousness. Perhaps you’ve seen the play called The Music Man. It’s about a fast-talking man who arrives in a small town with the intention of hugely upgrading a marching band. However, he can’t play any instruments, doesn’t know how to lead a band, and doesn’t really have any musical skills whatsoever. The Music Man is a comedy, but it’s not totally unrealistic. Some managers in the computer industry don’t know how to format a document. Some automobile executives could not change a tire. There was once even a vice president who couldn’t spell potato. It’s not a good idea to lack the fundamental technical skills of your industry, and it’s really not a good idea to get caught lacking them. So let’s see what you can do to avoid those problems.

An escort carrier was built on a cargo ship’s hull. Shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser was the Lee Iacocca of his day, a visionary industrialist whose name was a household word.

But one thing was perfectly clear: John was sacrificing himself to save the company. He was over his head and he knew it. Although it meant the end of his own career, he bent over backward to make sure that the transition would go as smoothly as possible. He blew himself out of the water to bring Chrysler back to life. And that is the test of a real hero.

Why don’t we pass a law that says when you borrow money to buy somebody else and cannibalize him, the interest payments on those loans are not deductible? That would get the excesses out of the system pretty fast. Right now, if you want to buy up a competitor, generally you can’t. That would violate the antitrust laws. But if you want to buy a company that does something else entirely, that’s okay. Where’s the sense in that?

Setbacks are a natural part of life, and you’ve got to be careful how you respond to them.

But McNamara knew more than the actual facts—he also knew the hypothetical ones. When you talked with him, you realized that he had already played out in his head the relevant details for every conceivable option and scenario.

By their very nature, financial analysts tend to be defensive, conservative, and pessimistic. On the other side of the fence are the guys in sales and marketing—aggressive, speculative, and optimistic. They’re always saying, “Let’s do it,” while the bean counters are always cautioning you on why you shouldn’t do it. In any company you need both sides of the equation, because the natural tension between the two groups creates its own system of checks and balances.

It was as if the Reagans felt the rules were never meant to apply strictly to them or to the people who worked for their administration. But in a decade whose cultural heroes included Donald Trump, Lee Iacocca, and T. Boone Pickens, Jr., Reagan's blurring of the distinctions between wealth and commonwealth caused him no political damage. If anything, it simply underlined the extent to which he was the consummate man of his time.

It’s a good thing God doesn’t let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself.

You can go a long way with some integrity.

I learned about the strength you can get from a close family life. I learned to keep going, even in bad times. I learned not to despair, even when my world was falling apart. I learned that there are no free lunches. And I learned the value of hard work.

You can get straight As in marketing and still flunk ordinary life. —NEWMAN TO LEE IACOCCA AFTER IACOCCA’S PINTO CAUGHT FIRE

Mistakes are a part of life; you can’t avoid them. All you can hope is that they won’t be too expensive and that you don’t make the same mistake twice.

It looks bad right now, but remember, this too shall pass.

after reaching the presidency I experienced a certain letdown. I had spent years climbing the mountain. When I finally made it to the top, I started to wonder why I had been in such a hurry to get there.

It’s a good thing God doesn’t let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself. But He’s a charitable Lord: He only lets you see one day at a time.

I began by reducing my own salary to $ 1.00 a year. Leadership means setting an example. When you find yourself in a position of leadership, people follow your every move. I don’t mean they invade your privacy, although there’s some of that, too. But when the leader talks, people listen. And when the leader acts, people watch. So you have to be careful about everything you say and everything you do.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works” — Ed Catmull.

RIP Lee Iacocca..His autobiography taught my MBA batch reading... I still remember on very first day of our Director Mr. Syamal Ram Kishore spoke about the legendary Lee... and most of us knew only about "Bruce Lee" and a few of comic bugs knew of "Stan Lee" but this man had "Lee" as his first name.. So he forced us to read it.. Was wonderful experience... Whatta man, creator and influence.... "Lee Iacocca"... Not to Forget his "MUSTANG

What the last fifty taught us was the difference between right and wrong, that only hard work succeeds, that there are no free lunches, that you’ve got to be productive. Those are the values that made this country great.

Charlie Beacham used to say that once a guy is over twenty-one, you’ll never really change his style or his habits. You may think you can, but his self-image is locked in. Nobody is ever humble enough to learn after he’s grown up.

Democratic administration that put people ahead of ideology. Democrats usually do. They deal with labor, they deal with people, they deal with jobs. Republicans deal with trickle-down theories of investment.

I discovered that people accept a lot of pain if everybody’s going through the chute together. If everybody is suffering equally, you can move a mountain. But the first time you find someone goofing off or not carrying his share of the load, the whole thing can come unraveled. I call this equality of sacrifice. When I started to sacrifice, I saw other people do whatever was necessary.

The first is whether he’s lazy, and the second is whether he’s got any horse sense. There’s no qualitative analysis to check out whether he’s got some fire in his belly, or whether he will have savvy—or street smarts—when it comes to decision time.

But engineering no longer interested me. The day I’d arrived, they had me designing a clutch spring. It had taken me an entire day to make a detailed drawing of it, and I said to myself: “What on earth am I doing? Is this how I want to be spending the rest of my life?” I wanted to stay at Ford, but not in engineering. I was eager to be where the real action was—marketing or sales. I liked working with people more than machines.

Beacham used to talk about street smarts, the things you just know, the basic lessons that can’t really be taught. “Remember, Lee,” he would say, “the only thing you’ve got going for you as a human being is your ability to reason and your common sense. That’s the only real advantage we’ve got over the apes. Remember, a horse is stronger and a dog is friendlier. So if you don’t know a dip of horseshit from a dip of vanilla ice cream—and a lot of guys don’t—that’s just too bad, because then you can never really make it.

What are your objectives for the next ninety days? What are your plans, your priorities, your hopes? And how do you intend to go about achieving them?

the discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen. In conversation, you can get away with all kinds of vagueness and nonsense, often without even realizing it. But there’s something about putting your thoughts on paper that forces you to get down to specifics. That way, it’s harder to deceive yourself—or anybody else.

But a major reason capable people fail to advance is that they don’t work well with their colleagues.

There’s a world of difference between a strong ego, which is essential, and a large ego—which can be destructive. The guy with a strong ego knows his own strengths. He’s confident. He has a realistic idea of what he can accomplish, and he moves purposefully toward his goal. But the guy with a large ego is always looking for recognition. He constantly needs to be patted on the back. He thinks he’s a cut above everybody else. And he talks down to the people who work for him. The

When the product is right, you don’t have to be a great Marketer” Lee Iacocca, CEO of Chrysler, Father of the Mustang

It seems that in the United States the one thing you can count on is that even during a depression, the rich get richer.

You can aim at a duck and get it in your sights, but the duck is always moving. In order to hit the duck, you have to move your gun. But a committee faced with a major decision can’t always move as quickly as the events it’s trying to respond to. By the time the committee is ready to shoot, the duck has flown away.

The trouble with you, Phil, is that you went to Harvard, where they taught you not to take any action until you’ve got all the facts. You’ve got ninety-five percent of them, but it’s going to take you another six months to get that last five percent. And by the time you do, your facts will be out of date because the market has moved on you. That’s what life is all about—timing.

But I do think that our national leadership consists of too many lawyers and not enough people from business. I’d like to see a system where we brought in twenty top managers to run the business side of the country and maybe even paid them $1 million a year, tax-free. That would be a real incentive, and then we’d see a lot more talented people interested in public life.

McKinsey can also be hired when one executive needs “disinterested” support for an idea that might just also result in the removal of an internal rival. Lee Iacocca wrote in his autobiography that when Henry Ford wanted Iacocca out of the firm, he hired McKinsey to recommend a new organizational structure. Iacocca went to Chrysler, where he used Bain & Company instead of McKinsey.29 Finally,