Shareholders Inspirational Quotes

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it. Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief - WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care? People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us. For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation. Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order. Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to. You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills. Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left. Trust is maintained when values and beliefs are actively managed. If companies do not actively work to keep clarity, discipline and consistency in balance, then trust starts to break down. All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.

Stop Destroying Shareholder Value

How can HOW help us repair our faltering global economy? Only by getting our "hows" right can we ensure that we are sustainable. This can only be achieved when we are rooted in, and inspired by, sustainable values. The global economic meltdown supplied a perfect, but painful, example of how sustainability cannot be guided by situational values. The economic crash occurred because too many financial companies became disconnected from fundamental values and long-term sustainable thinking. Instead of nurturing sustainable collaborations, banks, lenders, borrowers and shareholders pursued short-term relationships founded on situational values. More than ever we need to get out of this cycle of crises and build long-term success and deep human connections so that we achieve enduring significance in today's globally interconnected world.

If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principal #8, “think big”: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. In 2010, Amazon was a successful online retailer, a nascent cloud provider, and a pioneer in digital reading. But Bezos envisioned it as much more. His shareholder letter that year was a paean to the esoteric computer science disciplines of artificial intelligence and machine learning that Amazon was just beginning to explore. It opened by citing a list of impossibly obscure terms such as “naïve Bayesian estimators,” “gossip protocols,” and “data sharding.” Bezos wrote: “Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers.

When I spoke to you here the last time, my old party comrades, I did so fully conscious of victory as hardly a mortal has been able to do before me. In spite of this, a concern weighed heavily on me. It was clear to me that, ultimately, behind this war was that incendiary who has always lived off the quarrels of nations: the international Jew. I would no longer have been a National Socialist had I ever distanced myself from this realization. We followed his traces over many years. In this Reich, probably for the first time, we scientifically resolved this problem for all time, according to plan, and really understood the words of a great Jew who said that the racial question was the key to world history. Therefore, we knew quite well-above all, I knew-that the driving force behind these occurrences was the Jew. And that, as always in history, there were blockheads ready to stand up for him: partly spineless, paid characters, partly people who want to make deals and, at no time, flinch from having blood spilled for these deals. I have come to know these Jews as the incendiaries of the world. After all, in the previous years, you saw how they slowly poisoned the people via the press, radio, film, and theater. You saw how this poisoning continued. You saw how their finances, their money transactions, had to work in this sense. And, in the first days of the war, certain Englishmen-all of them shareholders in the armament industry-said it openly: “The war must last three years at least. It will not and must not end before three years.”-That is what they said. That was only natural, since their capital was tied up and they could not hope to secure an amortization in less than three years. Certainly, my party comrades, for us National Socialists, this almost defies comprehension. But that is how things are in the democratic world. You can be prime minister or minister of war and, at the same time, own portfolios of countless shares in the armament industry. Interests are explained that way. We once came to know this danger as the driving force in our domestic struggle. We had this black-red-golden coalition in front of us; this mixture of hypocrisy and abuse of religion on the one hand, and financial interests on the other; and, finally, their truly Jewish-Marxist goals. We completely finished off this coalition at home in a hard struggle. Now, we stand facing this enemy abroad. He inspired this international coalition against the German Volk and the German Reich. First, he used Poland as a dummy, and later pressed France, Belgium, Holland, and Norway to serve him. From the start, England was a driving force here. Understandably, the power which would one day confront us is most clearly ruled by this Jewish spirit: the Soviet Union. It happens to be the greatest servant of Jewry. Time meanwhile has proved what we National Socialists maintained for many years: it is truly a state in which the whole national intelligentsia has been slaughtered, and where only spiritless, forcibly proletarianized subhumans remain. Above them, there is the gigantic organization of the Jewish commissars, that is, established slaveowners. Frequently people wondered whether, in the long run, nationalist tendencies would not be victorious there. But they completely forgot that the bearers of a conscious nationalist view no longer existed. That, in the end, the man who temporarily became the ruler of this state, is nothing other than an instrument in the hands of this almighty Jewry. If Stalin is on stage and steps in front of the curtain, then Kaganovich and all those Jews stand behind him, Jews who, in ten-thousandfold ramifications, control this mighty empire. Speech in the Löwenbräukeller Munich, November 8, 1941

Service journalists. That's how an editor-in-chief described us to a roomful of corporate communicators. We are, he said, purveyors of ideas, of information and inspiration through writing intended to produce a positive response. Call what we do, then, action journalism. Transcending the mere delivery of information, it is writing with the expectation that our readers will act as a result of reading our words. And because of what we expect from them as a result of our efforts, a huge difference separates our kind of writing from the standard journalist's. They report and analyze. We report and advocate. They help sell newspapers and magazines. We help achieve organizational goals by influencing action. We create and enhance employee, shareholder, and customer confidence, build faith in corporate leadership, pride in its products. We heighten employee morale, foster belief in our company's intrinsic worth and trust in its mission. Ours is journalism with a definite slant, specific points of view, ulterior motives, particular objectives, all tilted toward the company, institution, association, or agency employing us.

Over the last three decades, Buffett has consistently sought to own either all or part of good businesses for a fair to bargain price. The results have been awe-inspiring.

people who share your beliefs and want to incorporate your ideas, your products and your services into their own lives as WHATs to their own WHYs. They look to WHAT you do as a tangible element that demonstrates their own purpose, cause or belief to the outside world. Their willingness to pay a premium or suffer inconvenience to use your product or service says more about them than it does about you and your products. Their ability to easily see WHY they need to incorporate your products into their lives makes this group the most loyal customers. They are also the most loyal shareholders and the most loyal employees. No matter where they sit in the spectrum, these are the people who not only love you but talk about you. Get enough of the people on the left side of the curve on your side and they encourage the rest to follow.

America’s Funniest Home Videos,” the TV series that began in 1990, also served as inspiration. Its entertaining content was constantly interrupted by the hosts’ annoying commentary. Here, my annoying commentary is kept to a minimum.

He knew that if he wanted to build a real, lasting success, people had to win not for him, not for the shareholders and not even for the customer. For the success to last the employees of Continental had to want to win for themselves.

company’s responsibility to look after the employees first. Happy employees ensure happy customers, he said. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order.

employees come first and if employees are treated right, they treat the outside world right, the outside world uses the company’s product again, and that makes the shareholders happy. That really is the way that it works and it’s not a conundrum at all.

Happy employees ensure happy customers, he said. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—

When top management asks departments to make their budgets, people play a game called sandbagging—they push for the lowest possible expectation to make sure they will achieve the targets and collect their bonuses. When the numbers don’t add up, top management arbitrarily imposes higher targets (which they make sure exceed what they promised to shareholders, to ensure they will make their bonuses too), which people lower down have no choice but to accept. Instead of frank discussions about what’s feasible and what’s not, people exchange spreadsheets with fictive forecasts driven by fear of not making the numbers. In the process, budgets fail to deliver on one of their key objectives: making people feel accountable and motivated for their outcomes.