a BUSINESS
GLOSSARY

Accountant
“Accountants are the witch-doctors
of the modern world and
willing to turn their hands to
any kind of magic.”
– Charles Eustace Harman

Action
“The world is moving so fast these
days that the one who says it can’t
be done is generally interrupted
by someone doing it.”
– Harry Emerson Fosdick

Advertising
“Every advertisement should be
thought of as a contribution to the
complex symbol which is the
brand image.”
– David M. Ogilvy

Assets
“People are definitely a company’s
greatest asset. It doesn’t make any
difference whether the product is
cars or cosmetics. A company is
only as good as the people it keeps.”
– Mary Kay Ash

Backbiting
“Nobody raises his reputation
by lowering others”
– Anonymous

Boss
“Accomplishing the impossible
means only that the boss will add
it to your regular duties.”
– Doug Larson

Brainstorm
“It is not best that we all should
think alike, it is differences
of opinion that make horse races.”
– Mark Twain

Branding
“ We’re not in the business of
keeping the media companies alive.
We’re in the business
of connecting with consumers.”
– Trevor Edwards

Budget
“A budget tells us what we can’t
afford, but it doesn’t keep us
from buying it.”
– William Feather

Bureaucracy
“Bureaucracy defends the
status quo long past the time when the
status quo has lost its status.”
– Laurence J. Peter

Business
“Business is not financial science,
it's about trading, buying and selling. It’s
about creating a product or service so
good that people will pay for it.”
– Anita Roddick

Capital
“It takes more than capital to swing
business. You’ve got to have the
A. I. D. degree to get by – Advertising
Initiative, and Dynamics.”
– Isaac Asimov

Capitalism
“Capitalism is a system
of competitive exploitation.”
– Dr. Tony Aidoo

Challenge
“When people keep telling you that you can’t
do a thing, you kind of like to try it.”
– Margaret Chase Smith

Change
We must always change,
renew, rejuvenate ourselves;
otherwise, we harden.
– Goethe

Communication
“Communication leads to community,
that is, to understanding,
intimacy and mutual valuing.”
– Rollo May

Competition
“Competition brings out the best
in products and the worst in people.”
– David Sarnoff

Consumer
“The consumer isn’t a moron.
She is your wife.”
– David Ogilvy

Control
“What you do speaks so loudly that
I cannot hear what you say.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

CSR
“People are going to want, and be able,
to find out about the citizenship of a brand,
whether it is doing the right things socially,
economically and environmentally.”
– Mike Clasper

Creativity
“A painter told me that nobody
could draw a tree without in some
sort becoming a tree.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Credit
“Credit is a system whereby a person
who can’t pay gets another person who
can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay.”
– Charles Dickens

Culture
“For an adequate formation of a culture,
the involvement of the whole man is
required, whereby he exercises his
creativity, intelligence, and knowledge
of the world and of people.”
– Pope John Paul II

Customer
“We see our customers as invited guests
to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our
job every day to make every important
aspect of the customer experience
a little bit better.”
– Jeff Bezos

Customer Service
“Politeness and consideration for
others is like investing pennies and
getting dollars back.’
– Thomas Sowell

Debt
“Bad debt is sacrificing your future day
needs for your present day desires.”
– Suze Orman

Delegation
“You cannot build character and
courage by taking away a man's
initiative and independence.”
– Abraham Lincoln

Discipline
“When you have disciplined people, you don’t
need hierarchy. When you have disciplined
thought, you don’t need bureaucracy.
When you have disciplined action, you
don’t need excessive control.”
– Jim Collins

Diversity
“We have become not a melting pot
but a beautiful mosaic. Different people,
different beliefs, different yearnings,
different hopes, different dreams.”
– Jimmy Carter

Earnings
“Earnings can be pliable as putty
when the a charlatan heads the
company reporting them.”
– Warren Buffet

Effectivenss
“Well, I won’t say I can or I can’t;
but if I do, I do it before most people
get up in the morning.”
– Paul 'Bear' Bryant

Efficiency
“Trifles make perfection, but
perfection is no trifle.”
– Michelangelo

Employees
“Always treat your employees
exactly as you want them to treat
your best customers.”
– Stephen Covey

Ethics
“Ethics is knowing the difference
between what you have a right
to do and what is right to do.”
– Potter Stewart

Execution
“Only passions, great passions,
can elevate the soul to great things.”
– Denis Diderot

Experience
“Experience is the child of thought, and
thought is the child of action.
We cannot learn men from books.”
– Benjamin Disreali

Facts
“Get the facts, or the facts will get you.
And when you get them, get them right,
or they will get you wrong.”
– Dr. Thomas Fuller

Finance
“It sometimes seems to me that I have
spent all my life trying to persuade
bankers to extend their loans.”
– Richard Branson

Focus
“I find hope in the darkest of days, and
focus in the brightest. I do not judge
the universe.”
– Dalai Lama

Forecast
“It’s really hard to design products by focus
groups. A lot of times,people don’t know
what they want until you show it to them.”
– Steve Jobs

Frontline
“An executive knows something about
everything, a technician knows everything
about something and the switchboard
operator knows everything.”
– Harold Coffin

Globalisation
“Globalisation has gone wrong, as it has no
rules. Multinationals are almost above the
law. They are so huge they are bigger
than governments.”
– Dick Smith

Growth
“Growth for the sake of
growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
– Edward Abbey

Human Capital
“Endeavours succeed or fail because of the
people involved. Only by attracting the best
people will you accomplish great deeds.”
– Colin Powell

Image
“Be more splendid, more extraordinary.
Use every moment to fill yourself up.”
– Oprah Winfrey

Imagination
“There is a boundary to men’s passions when
they act from feelings; but none when
they are under the influence of imagination.”
– Edmund Burke

Implementaton
“He who every morning plans the
transaction of the day and follows out that
plan, carries a thread that will guide him
through the maze of the most busy life.”
– Victor Hugo

Internet
“The Internet is the heart of this new
civilization, and telecommunications are
the nervous system, or circulatory system.”
– Carlos Slim Helu

Innovation
“Just as energy is the basis of life itself,
and ideas the source of innovation, so is
innovation the vital spark of all human
change, improvement and progress.”
– Ted Levitt

Investor
“He wants to get something for nothing.
He does not wish to work. He doesn’t
even wish to have to think.”
– Jesse Livermore

Job
“I insist that we continually ask our staff
for any suggestions they might have,
and I try my hand at their jobs.”
– Richard Branson

Knowledge Management
“A person who graduated
yesterday and stops studying
today is uneducated tomorrow.”
– Anonymous

Labour
“Labour is prior to, and independent of,
capital. Capital is only the fruit of labour, and
could never have existed if labour had not
first existed. Labour is superior to capital,
and deserves much the higher consideration.”
– Abraham Lincoln

Leadership
“The quality of a leader is
reflected in the standards they
set for themselves.”
– Ray Kroc

Management
“There are really only three types of
people: those who make things happen,
those who watch things happen, and those
who say, what happened?”
– Ann Landers

Marketing
“ Our belief is that marketing and product
have converged. The consumer doesn’t
separate the marketing experience
from the product experience.”
– Ajaz Ahmed

Meetings
“Meetings are a symptom of bad
organisation. the fewer
meetings the better.”
– Peter F. Drucker

Memo
“Bureaucrats write memoranda both
because they appear to be busy when they
are writing and because the memos, once
written, immediately
becomes proof that they were busy. ”
– Charles Peters

Motivation
“There is only one way... to get anybody
to do anything. And that is by making
the other person want to do it.”
– Dale Carnegie

Negotiations
“The most important trip you may
take in life is meeting people half way.”
– Henry Boyle

Opportunity
“The future is not an inheritance,
it is an opportunity and an obligation.”
– Bill Clinton

Outsource
“Another word for outsourcing is
trade – an endeavour, as economists
learned early on, that benefits both
parties to the exchange.”
– James Glassman

Participation
“What I hear, I forget.
What I see, I remember.
What I do, I understand.”
– Confucius

Partners
“Treat employees like partners,
and they act like partners.”
– Fred A. Allen

Planning
“In preparing for battle I have always
found that plans are useless, but
planning is indispensable.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

Power
“Being powerful is like being
a lady. If you have to tell people
you are, you aren't.”
– Margaret Thatcher

Problem
“When you confront a problem,
you begin to solve it.”
– Rudy Giuliani

Product
“I don’t design clothes,
I design dreams.”
– Ralph Lauren

Productivity
“Not doing more than the
average is what keeps the average down.”
– William M. Winans

Professionalism
“A professional is someone who can do
his best work when he doesn't feel like it.”
– Alistair Cooke

Profit
“The most important single central fact
about a free market is that no exchange
takes place unless both parties benefit.”
– Milton Friedman

Project Management
“It must be considered that there is nothing
more difficult to carry out nor more
doubtful of success nor more dangerous
to handle than to initiate a new
order of things.”
– Machiavelli

Promotion
“Any organisation is like a septic tank.
The really big chunks rise to the top.”
– John Imhoff

Public Relations
“Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent
men must realise that propaganda is the
modern instrument by which they can fight
for productive ends and help to bring order
out of chaos.”
– Edward Bernays

Quality
“Most quality programs fail for one or
two reasons. They have system without
passion, or passion without system.
You must have both.”
– Tom Peters

Readiness
“Many people die with their music still in
them. Why is this so? Too often it is because
they are always getting ready to live.
Before they know it, time runs out.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Recruitment
“Hire people who are better than you are,
then leave them to get on with it...; Look
for people who will aim the remarkable,
who will not settle for the routine.”
– David M. Ogilvy

Research
“Don't invest in anything that you don’t
understand. Do your research first.”
– Paul Clitheroe

Responsibility
“Instead of saying that man is the
creature of circumstances, it would
be nearer the mark to say that man
is the architect of circumstances.”
– Thomas Carlyle

Risk
“The woods would be very silent
if no birds sang except those
that sang best.”
– Henry Van Dyke

Sales
“Sales are contingent upon the
attitude of the salesman, not the
attitude of prospect.”
– William C. Stone

Salesmanship
“The definition of salesmanship is
the gentle art of letting
the customer have it your way.”
– Ray Kroc

Selling
“ Most people think ‘selling’ is the same
as ‘talking’. But the most effective
salespeople know that listening is the
most important part of their job.”
– Roy Bartell

Shares
“When somebody buys a stock it’s because
they think it’s going to go up and the
person who sold it to them thinks it’s going
to go down. Somebody’s wrong.”
– George Ross

Skill
“Today, a skilled manager makes more
than the owner. And owners fight each
other to get the skilled managers.”
– Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Stock Exchange
“When share markets are booming it’s easy
to believe the propaganda that shares will
always bounce back from a fall and
that shares always outperform other
investments over the long term.”
– Annette Sampson

Storytelling
“Stories are the creative conversion
of life itself into a more powerful, clearer,
more meaningful experience.
They are the currency of human contact.”
– Robert McKee

Strategy
“It is not the strongest of the species
that survive, nor the most intelligent, but
the one most responsive to change.”
– Charles Darwin

Stress
“Stress is when you wake up
screaming and realise
you haven’t fallen asleep yet.”
– Anonymous

Talent
“Great ability develops and reveals
itself increasingly with every
new assignment.”
– Baltasar Gracian

Tax
“A corporation’s primary goal is to
make money. Government’s primary
role is to take a big chunk of that
money and give it to others.”
– Larry Ellison

Team
“One man can be a crucial
ingredient on a team, but one man
cannot make a team.”
– Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Technology
“It lets people be creative. It lets people
be productive. It lets people learn things
they didn’t think they could learn before, and
so in a sense it is all about potential.”
– Steve Ballmer

The Future
“The empires of the future are
the empires of the mind.”
– Sir Winston Churchill

Time Management
“A wise person does at once, what
a fool does at last. Both do the same
thing; only at different times.”
– Baltasar Gracian

Training
Training is everything. The peach
was once a bitter almond;
cauliflower is nothing but cabbage
with a college education.
– Mark Twain

Trends
“Before you journey, observe the
wind carefully, detect its direction,
and then follow it.”
– Chin-Ning Chu

Work
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What
separates the talented individual from the
successful one is a lot of hard work.”
– Stephen King

Value
“Everyone needs to be valued.
Everyone has the potential to
give something back.”
– Princess Diana

Vision
“I skate to where the puck is
going to be, not to where it has been.”
– Wayne Gretzky

Compiled by
Hilary Richard Sam
kodwobrumpon@hotmail.com