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 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 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
Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, born in 1728, made his name as a novelist, playwright and poet, and is best known for The Vicar of Wakefield and the comedy She Stoops to Conquer. He also wrote a satirical work in letters called The Citizen of the World, narrated by an imagined Chinese philosopher living in London. … Read more
Pastor and author Charles R. Swindoll has spent decades teaching a simple idea: “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” Variations of the phrase existed in print before Swindoll became associated with it, but he is the one who built it into a lasting personal message, repeating it … Read more
Why this quote still matters today In June 2005, Steve Jobs stood in front of Stanford’s graduating class and said something that has since been repeated in more commencement speeches, LinkedIn posts and office posters than almost any other line from a tech executive: “The only way to do great work is to love what … Read more
Inventor Charles F. Kettering spent his working life in the untidy business of trying things that mostly did not work. He earned lasting recognition for inventing the electric starter, which replaced the hand crank in motor cars. People widely credit him with the line, “Keep on going and the chances are that you will stumble … Read more
The line is everywhere: “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” It shows up on gym walls, in graduation speeches, and at the bottom of a thousand social media posts, always credited to Confucius. The exact modern wording is a paraphrase rather than a direct translation, but … Read more
It’s easy to spot what’s wrong. Every workplace has someone who can list every flaw in a plan, every gap in a system, every reason something won’t work. Spotting the problem takes very little effort. Fixing it is a different job entirely, and it’s the job that actually moves things forward. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian … Read more