Thomas J. Watson Quotes

To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business and your business in your heart.

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all ... good design must primarily serve people.

It is a common mistake to think of failure as the enemy of success. Failure is a teacher-a harsh one, but the best. Pull your failures to pieces looking for the reason. Put your failure to work for you.

The toughest thing about the power of trust is that it's very difficult to build and very easy to destroy. The essence of trust building is to emphasize the similarities between you and the customer.

Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.

You don't hear things that are bad about your company unless you ask. It is easy to hear good tidings, but you have to scratch to get the bad news.

A manager is an assistant to his men.

Success is on the far side of failure.

Failure is a teacher; a harsh one, but the best.

Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous - not just to some people in some circumstances - but to everyone all the time.

The great accomplishments of man have resulted from the transmission of ideas and enthusiasm.

Since we built such sophisticated business machines, people tended to think of IBM as a model of order and logic - a totally streamlined organization in which we developed plans rationally and carried them out with utter precision. I never thought for a minute that was really the case.

Once an organization loses its spirit of pioneering and rests on its early work, its progress stops.

Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?