This one of my personal favorites created by Woody Allen:

Money is better than poverty - if only for financial reasons.

There should always be more to business than only making money. Passion and social responsibility are cornerstones of each business.

Expectations is what customers have of your products and services, you have of your employees and everyone has of everyone else, that was not so good but from me, so lets see what others have to say:

• Always do one thing less than what you think you can do. - Bernard Baruch, US financier
• Buy what is deliverable not what could be. - Michael Bloomberg, US entrepreneur
• Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise. - Alice Walker, US Pulitzer Price Winner

My favorite one for today is by Elizabeth MacKay, US Managing Director of Bear Stearns:

• If you follow your passion, the money will follow. But if you chase the almighty dollar, you can easily lose that and end up with nothing.

The US economist and writer Francis Fukuyama said about bureaucracy,

” Large, rigid bureaucracies, which sought to control everything….have been undermined by the shift towards a knowledge-based economy, which serves to “empower” individuals by giving them access to information.”

Other had the following to say about bureaucracy:

• Few great men could pass Personnel. - Paul Goodman, US educator and writer
• Gradually I contracted the chart fever. - Harvey Firestone, US Founder of Firestone Tire and Rubber
• A committee is a cul-de-sac, down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. - Barnett Cocks, British author.
• The giant power wielded by pygmies. - Honoré de Balzac, French writer.
• A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. - Dean Acheson, US statesman.

And the US writer, sociologist and feminist Barbara Ehrenreich may still be hoping:

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain.

Mr. Entrepreneur aka Richard Branson, said in a speech to the Institute of Directors in 1993:

“A well run business must have high and consistent standards of ethics.”

This is especially true in a small business or business start-up, if you want to have a chance of building a real small business team.

Others have the following wisdom on the subject:

• If you run in the forest, plant a tree. - Artuno Barrios, US athlete.
• We can be richer by being greener. - Tony Blair, British Prime Minister
• I run the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity. - Sydney Biddle Barrows, US brothel owner.

There are some “real” heavy-weights in terms of ethics among the above quoted, they are “uniquely qualified” to talk about the subject.

In the mid-nineties salami.com had the following sales pitch for their online shop, they certainly were early adopters:

The parking is easy, there are no checkout lines, we are open 24 hours a day, and we deliver right to your door.

If you think about it this is the way we do business today and it does not matter where you are, or how big or small your business is - you should be on the internet selling.

Other computer related quotations are:

• The search button on the browser no longer provides an ojective search, but a commercial one. - Tim Berners-Lee, Founder of the World Wide Web.
• Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork. - Sam Ewing, US author.
• What if computer were nearly free? - Bill Gates, ….Bill who?
• Computers are useless. They can only give us answers. - Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist.

Carl Lyons, marketing director of lastminute.com, said in 2000:

Marketing is marketing - it is easy to drape new media in magic, but it comes down to whether it’s a good business or not.

This is a very insightful statement and a good guide when you think about new media, technology and so on for your small business, if it does not move you forward - why do it?

A few more on marketing:

• Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master. - Philip Kotler, US marketing guru.
• Anyone can build market share and, if you set your prices low enough, you can get the whole damn market. - David Packard, US entrepreneur.
• Music is spiritual. The music business is not. - Van Morrision, Irish musician.

Here are some great quotes from some great people about our all goal - success:

• Eighty percent of success is showing up. - Woody Allen, US actor.
• It takes years to make an overnight success. - Eddie Cantor, US entertainer.
• Good business practices can ultimately weaken a great firm. - Clayton M. Christensen, US writer.
• The secret to success is constancy to purpose. - Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister.
• Success is made of 99 percent failure. - James Dyson, UK entrepreneur.

The last one is my favorite as I believe that to be the most accurate - in my experience.

My favorite of todays quotes is not attributed to anyone, but appeared in the Forbes magazine in 1987:

Good decisions come from wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.

That is painful, it’s so true. My next one is from one of the über-entrepreneurs J. Paul Getty:

If businessmen always made the right decisions, business would not be business.

The British swimmer Duncan Goodhew has this to say about bad decisions:

A bad decision is when you know what to do and you won’t do it.

Garaldine Laybourne, US chairman of Oxygen Media said this about decisions:

Business today is about making decisions amid ambiguity.

Last but not least, Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer has this to get us all totally confused:

When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

This is definitely a weekend theme to give you time to think about, get worked up about and then channel the energy into more efficient tax planning - here it goes:

• Read my lips, no new taxes. - George Bush, US President and liar.
• It was as true as ….taxes. And nothing’s truer than taxes. - Charles Dickens, British novelist.
• Taxes are a barrier to progress, and they punish rather than reward success. - Steve Forbes, US publisher.
• No taxation without respiration. - Bob Schaffer, US politician.
• But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. - Benjamin Franklin, US politician.

To be fair to George, he is in very esteem company. This always reminds me - if we run our business like some politicians run our countries - we all would be in jail.

Today I got a few I like to do with problems in general but apply just as well to small business problems.

This one was written on the wall of the General Motor’s research laboratory at Dayton, Ohio:

The problem when solved will be simple.

The British novelist G.K. Chesterton came up with this one, it is so true in many business situations:

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is they can’t see the problem.

This post could not be complete without Murphy’s Law - one of my favorite slogans:

If anything can go wrong, it will.