Indra Nooyi, born in India in 1955, joined PepsiCo in 1994 as head of strategic planning, became president and chief financial officer in 2001 and took over as chief executive in 2006, the first woman to hold the job. She led the company until 2018, and she often explained what the top job taught her. … Read more
Writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who lived from 1817 to 1862, is best known for Walden, his account of living simply beside a pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He also wrote long, frank letters to friends, and one of them, sent to Harrison Blake on November 16, 1857, contains this challenge: “It is not enough … Read more
B. C. Forbes, the Scottish-born journalist who founded Forbes magazine in 1917, spent his career studying why some businesses succeed. Born in 1880 as the sixth of ten children, he began writing in South Africa before moving to the United States and building a publication devoted to business leaders and their work. In his 1917 … Read more
Entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 to formerly enslaved parents, built a hair care business that made her America’s first recognised self-made female millionaire. Her parents died when she was a child, and she worked as a laundress in St. Louis before she started selling hair products. She told audiences at … Read more
This quote is widely attributed to Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian physician, theologian and musician who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. It appears in the 1984 collection The Words of Albert Schweitzer, though a single original book or speech for the exact wording is hard to confirm. It fits closely with his lifelong philosophy … Read more
This quote is consistently credited to Tom Peters, the American management writer best known for In Search of Excellence, and it appears under his name across business and leadership writing. A specific original book or speech for the exact wording is hard to pin down, so it is best described as “widely attributed to Tom … Read more
This quote is genuinely Disraeli’s. It comes from his 1832 novel Contarini Fleming, where the original line reads: “Never apologize for showing feeling, my friend. Remember that when you do so, you apologize for truth.” The shorter version that circulates online is a tidied-up paraphrase, and the meaning is identical. Disraeli went on to serve … Read more
This one deserves a correction before anything else. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s own research center at Monticello lists this quote as spurious, meaning it doesn’t appear anywhere in Jefferson’s letters, speeches or writings. Its earliest known appearance in print dates to 2004, nearly two centuries after Jefferson’s death, and it wasn’t attributed to him in … Read more
Writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who lived from 1817 to 1862, built a cabin beside Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, in 1845 and lived there for two years, two months and two days. He turned that experiment into Walden, published in 1854, and ended the book with a chapter of short, direct advice. In … Read more
“Waste No More Time Arguing What a Good Man Should Be. Be One” is a comfortable kind of conversation that never actually costs anything: discussing what good leadership looks like, debating what integrity means, arguing over the definition of fairness. These conversations can go on indefinitely, and feel productive while they’re happening, without a single … Read more