Business School Quotes

Brand names are well known to business school professors, but only one professor is a brand name herself. Call her Professor Oprah. ~ Bill Dedman

Business is essentially applied rationality:
a systematic process of thinking that produces a real-world result. Instead of mortgaging your life to go to business school, it's possible to dramatically increase your knowledge of business on your own time and with little cost - without setting foot inside a classroom. ~ Josh Kaufman

In 2007, Stanford Business School Advisory committee asserted that self awareness was the most important attribute a leader should develop. The challenge for the modern entrepreneur is to take that path. ~ Kevin Kelly DO The Pursuit Of Xceptional Execution

Business schools reward complex behavior but it's the simple behavior that makes you successful in life ~ John C. Maxwell

A great advantage I had when I started The Body Shop was that I had never been to business school. ~ Anita Roddick

If Thomas Edison had gone to business school, we would all be reading by larger candles. ~ Mark McCormack

For example, Shawn Cole, a professor at Harvard Business School, finds that Indian state-owned banks increase their lending to the politically important but relatively poor constituency of farmers by about 5 to 10 percentage points in election years.51 The effect is most pronounced in districts with close elections. The consequences of the lending are greater loan defaults and no measurable increase in agricultural output, which suggest that it really serves as a costly form of income redistribution. ~ Raghuram G. Rajan

I guess when you go to business school you never turn business off. ~ Mindy Kaling

One of the people who most influenced me was Ben Shapiro, a marketing professor at the business school. He used to rant and rave and pound his fist: 'It's all about the customers!' And he was right. He was also right that, at that time, retailing was devoid of really talented people; he urged me to go in that direction. ~ Thomas G. Stemberg

You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school. ~ Alan Alda

I didn't go to a business school. I didn't really study it. ~ Daniel S. Loeb

We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school. ~ Matthew Stewart

Let me tell you, very frankly, when I went to the Harvard Business School I was more or less a committed socialist. ~ P. Chidambaram

I went to art school in Chicago for a year at Columbia College. I had this whole master plan of getting into sustainable development and green architecture and construction, so I wanted to go to business school and then get my masters in construction and development. ~ Nico Tortorella

Well ... I graduated from the business school of Northumberland University in Newcastle. ~ Alexei Mordashov

I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business. ~ Helen DeWitt

I wanted to be a writer, to write these stories that would make people see the world in a different way. But I ended up going to business school because I thought I could ultimately get to where I wanted to go faster that way. ~ Jeffrey Skoll

Entrepreneur, design thinking is the ability to create, portray and deliver tomorrow's distinction, today. ~ ~ Onyi Anyado

I was told I had to go to business school to succeed. I gave it a shot, but eventually dropped out to bootstrap a restaurant with just a Visa card and a $20,000 line of credit. Everyone told me restaurants were hard work (and they were right! I have so much respect for anyone in the restaurant business). I ran the restaurant for two years, sold a franchise, decided to change paths, and sold the whole operation at a modest profit. ~ Ryan Holmes

Sometimes i feel that i am unlucky due to couldn't enroll in the Harvard Business School but at least by this encouragement that i enrolled in MBA in Human resource management program whereas i grown as a leader and build the team in the field of HRM through motivation. ~ Avinash Advani

In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form. ~ Karan Bajaj

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education. ~ Melinda Gates

Articulate each meeting's purpose (Making an announcement? Delivering a report?). Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished. Follow up with short communications summarizing the discussion, spelling out new work assignments and deadlines for completing them. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan's legendary mastery of meeting follow-up helped secure GM's industry dominance in the mid-twentieth century. ~ Harvard Business School Press

When husbands work fifty or more hours per week, wives with children are 44 percent more likely to quit their jobs than wives with children whose husbands work less.11 Many of these mothers are those with the highest levels of education. A 2007 survey of Harvard Business School alumni found that while men's rates of full-time employment never fell below 91 percent, only 81 percent of women who graduated in the early 2000s and 49 percent of women who graduated in the early 1990s were working full-time.12 ~ Sheryl Sandberg

In 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy ... in the end I'm excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn't mind. ~ Clayton Christensen

Now I've heard everyhing, I thought. Hired to find a person so her boyfriend would go to business school. ~ Sara Paretsky

Everyone told me it was a really stupid idea to start my own hedge fund right out of business school,' says Ackman of the idea. 'That's how I knew that it was a good idea. ~ Maneet Ahuja

I initially wanted to work in the music industry more on the A&R side. While I was in school, I began working in the New Business department of an advertising firm, and very quickly I was responsible for roughly 70% of their business, so you could say I had a natural knack for the advertising world. ~ Adam Kluger

In the United States we have the great Harvard Business School, but America is the country with the greatest debt in the world. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Great leaders rise out of adversity. ~ Harvard Business School Press

One of the newest figures to emerge on the world stage in recent years is the social entrepreneur. This is usually someone who burns with desire to make a positive social impact on the world, but believes that the best way of doing it is, as the saying goes, not by giving poor people a fish and feeding them for a day, but by teaching them to fish, in hopes of feeding them for a lifetime. I have come to know several social entrepreneurs in recent years, and most combine a business school brain with a social worker's heart. The triple convergence and the flattening of the world have been a godsend for them. Those who get it and are adapting to it have begun launching some very innovative projects. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Having taught economics courses at private vocational schools and universities, I have always had a problem with GNP as a yardstick of prosperity. GNP is improved by increases in questionable activities such as consumption of cigarettes and the production of weapons. Moreover, a substantial increase in car accidents will favorably affect GNP because more funerals, hospital visits, car repairs, and new car purchases will result. ~ Ernie J Zelinski

The time I have already spent at Harvard has been a stimulating experience, and I look forward to developing my relationship and activities with the students, faculty and friends of the Harvard Business School community. ~ Alex Ferguson

I didn't leave business school to go bankrupt. ~ Steve Ballmer

There's no better investment than your cleavage." Charlotte smirked. "I believe they teach that in business school. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on. ~ Matthew Stewart

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see. ~ Edward De Bono

The lessons I learned from my mother and her friends have guided me through death, birth, loss, love, failure, and achievement, on to a Fulbright scholarship and Harvard Business School. They taught me to believe that anything was possible. They have proven to be the strongest family values I could ever have imagined. ~ Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

I never learned management. I never went to business school. I'm an artist. I happened to have really clear ideas of what I thought my business should be. ~ Bobbi Brown

I never went to business school. I was just bumbling through a lot of my life. I was like the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. ~ David Geffen

Columbia Business School even has a term for it now. They call it "honest overconfidence" and they have found that men on average rate their performance to be 30 percent better than it is. ~ Katty Kay

I've lectured at the Harvard Business School several times. ~ Christie Hefner

You might just learn something when you're in a mood to learn something. The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

We tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy - note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The main trouble with Hollywood is that the guys you have to pitch to, the guys who run the studios, are all business school grads. ~ Terry Zwigoff

His dream is to one day be a famous Broadway star, but he says he lacks the ability to sing or act, so he's scaling down his dream and applying to business school, instead. ~ Colleen Hoover

My idea of government support was, you supply me with hospitals, schools and the environment to do well and that will do me fine. But do not poke your nose in my business. ~ Alan Sugar

I believe no amount of business school training or work experience can teach what is ultimately a matter of personal character. Businesses are not dishonest or greedy, people are. Thus, a business, successful or not, is merely a reflection of the character of its leadership. ~ S. Truett Cathy

If you're looking to become an entrepreneur then don't waste your time going to university or business school - just get on and do it. ~ Richard Branson

In high school, I worked at Abercrombie & Fitch, and once I graduated from business school at USC, I started a company with my partner and had a nine-to-seven job. ~ Rob Kardashian

I was a general business major, which meant that in any business school and particularly at Smith School, which is a very good school, you do a lot of team projects. Well I was the guy who gave the presentations for the team projects. ~ Kevin Plank

The way most people approach business - and the way they mostly teach in business school - involves the analytical mind. It divides it up and looks at parts in isolation. ~ John Mackey

Any path you take, if you commit with passion, you can be successful. By going to business school, certain opportunities may open up to you sooner. But it's who you are and how you take advantage of your opportunities that matter. ~ Dan Rosensweig

I took a job at the Walt Disney Company and after 18 months decided to go to business school at Harvard. I was awestruck by the campus. My first reaction was 'I don't belong here.' Then I said, 'I'm here; let's get on with it.' ~ Jason Kilar

I was actually accepted into medical school in Italy. But then I wanted to come back and learn medicine in Germany. And while waiting, I decided to join a business school. I figured it would be useful for doctors to know some business as well! ~ Jochen Zeitz

What the railroads lack is not opportunity but some of the managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made them great. ~ Harvard Business School Press

Don't go to business school. ~ Paul Hawken

I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller. ~ Terry Eagleton

When a young woman tells me that she wants to become and actor, I say, 'No, be a writer. Or go to business school and learn how to run a studio.' The only real change will come from behind the scenes. ~ Halle Berry

We made a plan at school to meet in her garage and kiss. It was like this little business deal. I kissed her and then I ran home ~ Brad Pitt

In Business School they taught us about cash flow, not about corporate politics; about return on equity, not about egos and pride. Oh, there were optional courses on 'Organizational Behavior' and 'Managerial Skills,' but these were a little too bloodless to convey what I learned on the job. ~ Mary Cunningham Agee

I'd like to go to NYU business school and then go on to film school. ~ Alexa Vega

LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs's Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs's father figure. JONATHAN "RUBY" RUBINSTEIN. Worked ~ Walter Isaacson

She built a close-knit team of talented people who bonded with one another and felt passion for the mission. Soon her group became one of the parent bank's most desirable places to work. She developed strong relationships with senior executives who helped her deal with tensions in the middle, and she communicated well and often about why her unit needed to be different. Her creativity, vision, teamwork, and persistence helped this group succeed and become a national role model, while other banks' efforts faltered. ~ Harvard Business School Press

In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non- world. ~ Peter Drucker

I was a writer for 'New York' magazine. I had been to business school, but what did I know? Still, everybody from the receptionists on up to the editor would ask me what they should do with their money. ~ Andrew Tobias

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. ~ John Perkins

Her father was one of those tall, angular, self-embalming types. All balls and liver. His kind predated the notion of alcoholism. Groton, Princeton, Harvard Business School. His neatly clipped silver hair and tailored suits and unmitigating stare of eyes and trim old body said it all over in a simple, clear language: Chief Executive Officer. Do not fuck with this man. ~ Chang-rae Lee

I didn't plan to be this dysfunctional at 27, but dysfunctionality has a way of creeping up on you. One second, you're 22, wrapping up your undergraduate degree from a top business school, and then suddenly, you're sitting alone in your car at 27, wondering how five years slipped trough your fingers without so much as a blink. ~ R.S. Grey

It horrifies me that ethics is only an optional extra at Harvard Business School. ~ John Harvey-Jones

I was fortunate that I came out to the Valley in 1979, when I came out to go to Stanford Business School, and my very first assignment as a teaching assistant for an investments professor was to - he told me go down to this computer company in Cupertino called Apple. ~ Frank Quattrone

Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I've done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin's success. I am aware that the ideas of business as being fun and creative goes right against the grain of convention, and it's certainly not how the they teach it at some of those business schools, where business means hard grind and lots of 'discounted cash flows' and net' present values'. ~ Richard Branson

Entrepreneur, with the growth of social media and the global market now local, now is the time to grow your leadership brand. ~ Onyi Anyado

Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn't get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked - until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones - until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. "Well, you can say, 'Everybody knows that,'" said Munger. "I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." Munger's ~ Michael Lewis

Business schools tend to focus on topics that are suitable to blackboards, so they overemphasize organization and finance. Until very recently, they virtually ignored manufacturing. I think of lot of the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s, and now more recently the 2000s can be traced pretty directly to the biases of the business schools. ~ Charles R. Morris

Managers who aspire to be ethical must challenge the assumption that they're always unbiased and acknowledge that vigilance, even more than good intention, is a defining characteristic of an ethical manager. ~ Harvard Business School Press

I find, in merchandising and design and creative, a business school degree isn't particularly helpful. ~ Mickey Drexler

I went to Huddersfield University Business School. That's where I learned my trade. ~ Rob James-Collier

I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven't yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School. ~ Clayton M Christensen

Sent him to the Harvard Business School to study the minds of the movers and shakers who were screwing up our economy for their own immediate benefit, taking money earmarked for research and development and new machinery and so on, and putting it into monumental retirement plans and year-end bonuses for themselves. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I think many people go to business school and learn ways to play it safe, ensuring that they avoid some of the pain that entrepreneurs endure while taking less calculated risks. ~ Sophia Amoruso

As a young analyst just out of Stanford business school in the 1960s, I got to really understand what growth was about. Back then, you had to ask a customer to pay some money. That was the most important thing in getting a company off the ground. ~ Charles Schwab

Most of my writing friends are working in academia. Most of my business school friends are always talking about bringing companies public, and money, and making money, and lots and lots of money. It's just a different environment. ~ Victoria Chang

Seeing the way leadership works in the real world is a tad more enlightening than reading case studies as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. ~ Jeetendr Sehdev

I want to see the church get closer to the people. I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools or structures. Because these need to get out! ~ Pope Francis

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage ... ~ Max McKeown

For business and life, if you are not experiencing growth, you're possibly dying. ~ Nkem Paul

When you first have a baby your life doesn't change. I mean, you have a little less sleep and you drag these cuddly things around you and it's just amazing. But you still get to be you. Once they get to, like, five, six and school and it starts to get, like, 'Wow, they got real problems. They're my responsibility.' Oh my God. That is overwhelming. ~ Gwen Stefani

When only one party makes a profit that's robbery when all parties make profit that's business. ~ Amit Kalantri

You know, if I look at an auditorium full of high school students and the big man on campus and his girlfriend are busy talking while the lecture's going on, the rest of the room is going to do it because they're powerful sneezers. They have influence. They reach out to a whole bunch of people in a way that makes the idea of being disrespectful spread. ~ Seth Godin

People will urge you to go to school. They'll tell you an American education is useful. That is not true. That is 80's. You are here to hustle. ~ E. C. Osondu

For a while I thought about studying medicine at school and becoming a doctor because I've always been interested in psychology and how people's minds operate. But I'm able to explore some of that as an actor and ultimately I think it seems more interesting. ~ Rumer Willis

Miranda wants Andre to rim you. Is that okay?"
"What is...is that?" Alex thinks about basketball. He played soccer in high school and he's kind of embarrassed about how little he knows the sport. Rim. Rim shot. Lay up? Free throw?
"It's where he licks your asshole...But most guys get into it after a little while...It feels nice, I promise."
So.
Not basketball. ~ Emory Vargas

I was far too embarrassed to share the experience of Indian food at school. As a kid, you're desperate to fit in, to assimilate in some way, and everything about me stood out. ~ Sanjeev Bhaskar

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence. ~ Charles Dickens

Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on. ~ Rem Koolhaas

What would you have me do?
Seek for the patronage of some great man,
And like a creeping vine on a tall tree
Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone?
No thank you! Dedicate, as others do,
Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon
In the vile hope of teasing out a smile
On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad
For breakfast every morning? Make my knees
Callous, and cultivate a supple spine,-
Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust?
No thank you! Scratch the back of any swine
That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns
Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right
Too proud to know his partner's business,
Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire
God gave me to burn incense all day long
Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you!
Shall I go leaping into ladies' laps
And licking fingers?-or-to change the form-
Navigating with madrigals for oars,
My sails full of the sighs of dowagers?
No thank you! Publish verses at my own
Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint
Of a small group of literary souls
Who dine together every Tuesday? No
I thank you! Shall I labor night and day
To build a reputation on one song,
And never write another? Shall I find
True genius only among Geniuses,
Palpitate over little paragraphs,
And struggle to insinuate my name
In the columns of the Mercury?
No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be a ~ Edmond Rostand

Let us thank all those who teach in Catholic schools. Educating is an act of love; it is like giving life. ~ Pope Francis

In the real world, the smartest people are people who make mistakes and learn. In school, the smartest people don't make mistakes. ~ Robert Kiyosaki