‘In Search of Excellence’ – even the title – is a reminder that business isn’t dry, dreary, boring, or by the numbers. Life at work can be cool – and work that’s cool isn’t confined to Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, or Tom Hanks. It’s available to all of us and any of us.
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.
You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State.
I’ve made movies that I thought were good. I’ve made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you’re in a movie and you think, I wish more people saw that – because you’re good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that’s show business.
If you help a chicken out of an egg, most of the time that bird will die. If you help a moth out of a cocoon, it’ll die because they don’t go through that struggle and maturation. I can give you a fish for the day and you’ll eat a day, but if I teach you to fish, you’ll eat for a lifetime. Maybe even start a business.
Because I was in the business of translating the ‘X-Men’ from the very successful comics, and taking the most popular book of the 20th century in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ and making it into three movies, I hope people realize I wouldn’t get involved in anything I didn’t think was really going to be worth their while.
Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars in 1999 to fifteen billion in 2013.
In an age where everything and everyone is linked through networks of glass and air, no one – no business, organization, government agency, country – is an island. We need to do right by all our stakeholders, and that’s how you create value for shareholders. And one thing is for sure – no organization can succeed in a world that is failing.
Just really, really believe in what you’re trying to do. Don’t let people alter that. Let people advise you and lead you down paths to make smart business decisions. But trust your instinct and trust that overwhelming drive that made you put all your dreams and everything on the line.
When I go to business meetings, I’m still told way too often by some receptionist, ‘The mail room is downstairs,’ to believe that racial perceptions don’t still exist. But I figure there are always going to be knuckleheads no matter how many of their herd get stuck in the tar pits of progress.
As actors, we deal with rejection so much more than any other business. So I don’t care how much of a genius you are, if you don’t have the propensity to be able to get back up every time you get knocked down, then you’re not going to survive.
The U.S. government uses cash accounting. That is illegal for any enterprise of any size in America except for the U.S. government. Every for-profit business, every not-for-profit business, every state and local government has to use real accounting except for Uncle Sam.
Some of the fans here were not too sure about their club signing a player from their biggest rivals. Fortunately, we had a great season and won the League title for the first time in four years. Now, I think, everyone can say it was good business.
Atticus Finch is, you know, he was just his whole – the business of his modesty and his ability to see tomorrow and to try to buttress his knowledge of what was coming for his kids was something that I’ll never – as a father I’m not able to do.
Bitcoin is both disruptive from a technology perspective, but there’s a tremendous power of social good behind it. So you can both build a cool business or have a great investment return, and there’s the promise of potentially improving the remittance industry or banking the unbanked.
More and more businesses are seeing the potential of a more sustainable business model, driven both by the firm belief that business can be a force for good and by the realization that the cost of inaction often exceeds the cost of action – notably when it comes to the growing threat of climate change and water scarcity.
While digital wallets are paving the way for the future of payments, you still need to assess whether or not they’ll work for your business. If your target audience are less tech-savvy or you’re primarily a cash-only business, it may not be worth investing too much into accepting digital payments.
There is no time and space in the digital world. People chat and collaborate through social networks. Cultural icons garner millions of fans online in locations they have often never been themselves. The boundary between public and private life is now everyone’s business.
Everything needs to work at the same time. But what keeps society vibrant permanently is jobs, industry, business, and stuff like that. It pays for everything else. If you just build affordable housing, and those people don’t have jobs, it’ll no longer be affordable soon. So you really have to build around the business community.
I think for business reasons, fiscal reasons, I think these cable networks can take greater risks and I think with a risk comes better programming. And I think USA has got an amazing identity to it now that is clearly defined with its ‘Characters welcome’ tag.
If being a werewolf is really a curse, you’ve got to treat it honorably. If werewolves are going to carry on, there has to be an incredibly powerful force. There is the business of the craving, the hunger for the kill. It has to be deeply pleasurable and more than an appetite for meat. There has to be a sensual dimension to it.
The saying in business is that, ‘You hire for skills and you fire for behavior.’ And one would argue that in order to move up in career, to be promoted, to take on additional responsibility, in many ways that’s linked more to the attitudes and behaviors that you carry rather than what you know technically about a given subject.
I grew up in the countryside with the factory here, my house 200 metres away, my grandma’s house 50 metres away, in a kind of old-style Italian society where everyone works for the family business, everyone lives nearby, and the people you spend your time with are your family.
Don’t compare me to Babe Ruth. God gave me the opportunity and the ability to be here at the right time, at the right moment, just like he gave Babe Ruth when he was playing. I just hope I can keep doing what I’ve been doing – keep taking care of business.
The percentage of people that go to drama college in the U.K. is probably just like anywhere in the world. It’s a very hard business to work in. They say that, at any one time, there’s only 5% of actors in the world that are actually working and getting paid, which is a shocking percentage, really.
