Michael E. Gerber Quotes

“A true business opportunity is the one that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on.”

“Delegating your accountabilities is abdication.”

“The true start-up of a business is what happens before you start-up.”

“Building a World Class Company is a commitment to the integration of passion, purpose, and practice.”

“Hell on earth is life as we have always lived it, and heaven on earth is breaking free of our long-standing patterns.”

“The key to becoming an entrepreneur is to be willing to start your business all over again.”

“A business that ‘gets small again’ is a business reduced to the level of its owner’s personal resistance to change, to its owner’s Comfort Zone.”

“A business that looks orderly says to your customer that your people know what they’re doing.”

“A mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.”

“Accountability literally means 'stand up and be counted'.”

“All you need to do is begin living your life as if it were important. All you need to do is take your life seriously. To create it intentionally. To actively make your life into the life you wish it to be.”

“Before you start your business, or before you return to it tomorrow, ask yourself the following questions:

- What do I wish my life to look like?
- How do I wish my life to be on a day-to-day basis?
- What would I like to be able to say I truly know in my life, about my life?
- How would I like to be with other people in my life — my family, my friends, my business associates, my customers, my employees, my community?
- How would I like people to think about me?
- What would I like to be doing two years from now? Ten years from now? Twenty years from now? When my life comes to a close?
- What specifically would I like to learn during my life — spiritually, physically, financially, technically, intellectually? About relationships?
- How much money will I need to do the things I wish to do? By when will I need it? These are just a few of the questions you might ask yourself in the creation of your Primary Aim.”

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.”

“Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.”

“Documentation is an affirmation of order.”

“For many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized.

The operative word here is clear. Documentation provides the clarity structure needs if it is to be meaningful to your people.”

“I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day.

They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.”

“I once heard a story about Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM. Asked to what he attributed the phenomenal success of IBM, he is said to have answered:

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream — my vision — was in place.

The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template.

At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.

Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one Now.”

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business — you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!”

“In the development of your Marketing Strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you forget about your dreams, forget about your visions, forget about your interests, forget about what you want — forget about everything but your customer!”

“It’s time for me to challenge my imagination and to begin the process of shaping an entirely new life. And the best way to do that anywhere in this whole wide opportunity-filled world is to create an exciting new business.”

“It’s up to you to dictate your business’s rate of growth as best you can by understanding the key processes that need to be performed, the key objectives that need to be achieved, the key position you are aiming your business to hold in the marketplace.”

“Most businesses are operated according to what the owner wants as opposed to what the business needs.”

“Most people today are not getting what they want. Not from their jobs, not from their families, not from their religion, not from their government, and, most important, not from themselves.

Something is missing in most of our lives. Part of what’s missing is purpose. Values. Worthwhile standards against which our lives can be measured. Part of what’s missing is a Game Worth Playing.”

“Most salespeople think that selling is 'closing'. It isn’t. Selling is opening.”

“Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but that the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely necessary for you to do so.”

“Quality is just a word, and an empty word at that, if it doesn’t include harmony, balance, passion, intention, attention. Continuous improvement for its own sake is a waste of time.

Life is what a business is about, and life is what this work is about. Coming to grips with oneself, in the face of an incredibly complex world that can teach us if we’re open to learn.”

“Remember, any plan is better than no plan. Because in the process of defining the future, the plan begins to shape itself to reality, both the reality of the world out there and the reality you are able to create in here.

And as those two realities merge, they form a new reality — call it your reality, call it the unique invention that is uniquely yours, the reality of your mind and your heart uniting with all the elements of your business, and your business with the world, shaping, designing, collaborating, to form something that never existed before in exactly that way.”

“Seen from the appropriate perspective, the entire business process by which your company does what it does is a marketing process.”

“Simply put, your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.”