Businesspeople From England

"Al these thynges consydered, there can no man resonably gaynsaye but there was a kyng of thys lande named Arthur. For in al places, Crysten and hethen, he is reputed and taken for one of the nine worthy, and the fyrst of the thre Crysten men."

"He that wil wynne he muste laboure and aventure."

"The worshipful fader and first foundeur and enbelissher of ornate eloquence in our Englissh. I mene Maister Geffrey Chaucer."

"And thus love is founded otherwhile upon good prouffitable and this love endureth as longe as he seeth his prouffit. And herof men saye a comyn proverbe in England that love lasteth as longe as the money endureth and whan the money faylleth than there is no love."

"Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined."

"Marketing, and the whole firm, should devote extraordinary endeavour towards delighting, keeping for ever and expanding the sales to the 20 per cent of customers who provide 80 per cent."

"Conventional wisdom is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk."

"Business strategy should not be a grand and sweeping overview. It should be more like an under view, a peek beneath the covers to look in great detail at what is going on."

"Progress is personal; it comes from individuals demanding more of themselves and everyone else."

"The key is to work out the few things that are really important, and the few methods that will give us what we really want."

"In business the 80/20 principle is behind any innovation, any extra value. It is an entrepreneurial principle, a formula for value creation utilized not only by entrepreneurs, but by most managers and organizations."

"People think that creativity is largely a matter of talent, experience, or luck. They are wrong. Talent, experience, and luck are all key elements, but there is something more fundamental, accessible, and powerful that you can use to multiply your creative effect."

"Those who can create wealth — and know that they can — are able to dictate their own terms. Wealth is a means to happiness, but it is not the main one. What most people want is control over their lives. They want the ability to choose how they live: what work they do, the way they interact with friends and colleagues, the quality of their personal relationships, the way they view themselves."

"In 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) noticed a regular pattern in distributions of wealth or income, no matter the country or time period concerned. He found that the distribution was extremely skewed toward the top end: A small minority of the top earners always accounted for a large majority of the total wealth. The pattern was so reliable that Pareto was eventually able to predict the distribution of income accurately before looking at the data. Pareto was greatly excited by his discovery, which he rightly believed was of enormous importance not just to economics but to society as well. But he managed to enthuse only a few fellow economists.... Pareto's idea became widely known only when Joseph Moses Juran, one of the gurus of the quality movement in the twentieth century, renamed it the "Rule of the Vital Few." In his 1951 tome The Quality Control Handbook, which became hugely influential in Japan and later in the West, Juran separated the "vital few" from the "trivial many," showing how problems in quality could be largely eliminated, cheaply and quickly, by focusing on the vital few causes of these problems. Juran, who moved to Japan in 1954, taught executives there to improve quality and product design while incorporating American business practices into their own companies. Thanks to this new attention to quality control, between 1957 and 1989, Japan grew faster than any other industrial economy."

"Everything you want should be yours: the type of work you want; the relationships you need; the social, mental, and aesthetic stimulation that will make you happy and fulfilled; the money you require for the lifestyle that is appropriate to you; and any requirement that you may (or may not) have for achievement or service to others. If you don’t aim for it all, you’ll never get it all. To aim for it requires that you know what you want"

"This is a Tale about a tail — a tail that belonged to a little red squirrel, and his name was Nutkin."

"I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense..."

"My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A .A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too. I don’t think I’ve trusted any author since who doesn’t address me with that assumption."

"Painting is an awkward thing to teach except the details of the medium. If you and your master are determined to look at nature and art in two different directions you are sure to stick."

"It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is "soporific." I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuces; but then I am not a rabbit."

"Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were – Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter."

"Don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor."

"But I also dreamt, which pleased me most, That you lov'd me still the same."

"The light of other days is faded, And all their glories past."

"The heart bowed down by weight of woe To weakest hope will cling."

"I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls, With vassals and serfs at my side."

"For all of us who have been fortunate enough to make capital, we can’t take it with us in any case, so let’s act responsibly with it. Let’s put something back in."

"If you want to build a major firm, you cannot do it by having a modest vision."

"The first rule of luck in business is that you should persevere in doing the right thing. Opportunities will come your way if you do."

"Fear became my weapon."

"I am ever solicitous for your future prosperity, and I wish that I could convince you, as I feel convinced, that it all depends upon your bringing out with spirit the talents you possess. I wish that I could impart to you a little of that Bonapartian feeling with which I am imbued—a feeling that spurs me on with the conviction that all the obstacles to fortune with which I am impeded, will (nay, shall) yield if assailed with energy. All is lost to you, if you succumb to those desponding views which you mentioned when we last spoke. Dame Fortune, like other fair ones, loves a brisk and confident wooer. I want to see you able to pitch your voice in a higher key, especially when you are espousing your own interests, and above all, never to see you yield or become passive and indifferent when your cause is just, and only wants to be spiritedly supported to be sure of a triumph. But all this must proceed from within, and can be only the fruits of a larger growth of spirit, to the cultivation of which without further lecture I most earnestly commend you."

"He hated Factory Acts as bitterly as he hated trades-unions. He would have permitted nothing to come between the manufacturer and his profit. If it were necessary to restrict the hours of labour, the workmen should rely, not upon Parliament, but upon their own efforts. Combination being manifestly intolerable, the remedy of each man was plain: he should save £20 and emigrate to America. In other words, what was tyranny in a landowner was enterprise in a manufacturer. And those eager Radicals who believe that the teaching of Cobden is infallible would do well to remember his famous pronouncement upon workmen's combinations. "Depend upon it," said he, in the true accent of Manchester, "nothing can be got by fraternising with trades-unions. They are founded upon principles of brutal tyranny and monopoly. I would rather live under a Dey of Algiers than a Trade Committee.""

"Cobden denied that our dependencies oversea needed any protection. Doubtless he would have let our colonies go, in the same spirit in which he would have renounced India, or "thanked his stars that America had broke loose." He indignantly repudiated the argument that ships of war were necessary to protect our colonial trade, and he had so little knowledge of mankind as to believe that wealth and commerce were the real test of a nation's power in the eyes of its enemies. Which is to say that a traveller is safest from a highwayman when he carries most money in his pocket. The disarmament which he advocated was, of course, one-sided, like his free trade; but happily the country which followed him innocently in quest of that costliest commodity, cheap food, was not prepared to disband its army and break up its ships at the bidding of a rival."

"So the Corn Laws were repealed, and, as every one knows, all Cobden's predictions were falsified. He was not one to be daunted by the failure of his hopes. Like most Radicals, he lived in a fool's paradise where facts are of no account, and where, if principles prove fallacious, it is not the fault of the optimist who frames them, but of some vile conspirator against the common good. For many years Cobden had declared that repeal would increase the wages of the labouring class; nor was he abashed when he witnessed their speedy fall. It was enough for him to point out that the cost of living had decreased a little more than wages, and he was wholly indifferent to the fact that this argumentative jugglery was what he had been denouncing in his speeches for ten years. And he had a remedy ready. He told the landlords that they must abolish battue-shooting, and, to confront the depression of agriculture, which he had said would never be depressed, he urged the labourers "to set gins and snares upon their allotments and in their gardens to catch all the hares and rabbits they could, and when they caught them, to be sure to put them in their own pots and eat them themselves." This is a sad descent from the dreams of eternal peace, the visions of disbanded armies and of swords beaten into ploughshares, which were wont to decorate the agitator's harangues. The demagogue who once saw in the principle of Free Trade "that which will act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe" was three years later forced to substitute for his multi-coloured visions a humble policy of gins, snares, and boiled rabbits."

"The unquestionably greatest Englishman whom the present century has produced."

"Richard Cobden was, above all things, a thorough democrat, and his followers trusted before everything else that he would establish democracy upon the ruins of the aristocracy, and that he would destroy whatever was left to the great landowners of their feudal privileges."

"In reference to our proposing these measures, I have no wish to rob any person of the credit which is justly due to him for them. But I may say that neither the gentlemen sitting on the benches opposite, nor myself, nor the gentlemen sitting round me—I say that neither of us are the parties who are strictly entitled to the merit. There has been a combination of parties, and that combination of parties together with the influence of the Government, has led to the ultimate success of the measures. But, Sir, there is a name which ought to be associated with the success of these measures: it is not the name of the noble Lord, the member for London, neither is it my name. Sir, the name which ought to be, and which will be associated with the success of these measures is the name of a man who, acting, I believe, from pure and disinterested motives, has advocated their cause with untiring energy, and by appeals to reason, expressed by an eloquence, the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned—the name which ought to be and will be associated with the success of these measures is the name of Richard Cobden. Without scruple, Sir, I attribute the success of these measures to him."

"Cobden was the greatest statesman and prophet of the century. His speeches are an inspiration. A man whose disciple I am willing to confess I am."

"I am totally at a loss to understand on what principle of "unnatural selection" you propose to elect Bismarck, of all God's creatures under the sun, a member of the Cobden Club. In the name of common-sense let me ask, what is the raison d'etre of this club? I joined it under the impression that the object of the association was to collect together all such persons as were considered likely to illustrate by their faith and works the particular principles which Cobden had fought for all his life. Now, of these principles, most undoubtedly, the main or pivotable one was that the international relations of mankind should be ruled by mutual love and good-will, arbitration, and the interchange of cotton goods and other good offices, and not by the ultima ratio of the stronger biceps and the newest breechloader. Whatever good Bismarck may have wrought in his generation to himself, his country and mankind, it is certain that he represents, par excellence, the exactly contrary view, and that, to such an extent, that when our great-grandchildren have to get up the history of the nineteenth century, they will to a certainty find Cobden labelled as the representative of the one doctrine—exchange of cotton goods and Christian love internationalism—and Bismarck as the representative of the opposite doctrine—exchange of hard knocks and blood and iron internationalism."

"Cobden's international ideas were based on patriotism and peace, the harmony of classes, reform by constitutional methods, goodwill among men and nations. Cobden...believed in individual liberty and enterprise, in free markets, freedom of opinion and freedom of trade. [His] whole creed was anathema to Karl Marx. He had no sense of patriotism or love of country. He urged what he called "the proletariat" in all countries to overthrow society by a violent revolution, to destroy the middle classes and all employers of labour, whom he denounced as capitalists and slave drivers. He demanded the confiscation of private property and a new dictatorship, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Just as Cobden interpreted and practised the precepts of Adam Smith, so Lenin interpreted and practised the precepts of Karl Marx. These two great men though dead yet speak. They stand out before the civilised world as protagonists of two systems of political economy, political thought and human society... [W]hen this war is over, we in Britain will certainly have to choose whether our Press and Parliament are to be free, whether we are to be a conscript nation, whether private property and savings are to be secured or confiscated, whether we are to be imprisoned without trial; whether we are again to enjoy the right of buying and selling where and how we please—in short whether were are to be ruled as slaves by the bureaucracy of a Police State or as free men by our chosen representatives. This conflict will be symbolised and personified by Richard Cobden and Karl Marx."

"All his earliest writings were on international relations. All his economic ideas were subordinated to a theory of foreign relations which sprang from something close to pacifism. He worked for free trade because he wanted peace, not for peace because he wanted free trade. In 1842 when he sought to ally the free trade movement to the Peace Societies it was as a means of converting Free Traders to pacifism, not of converting the Peace Societies to free trade. If free trade conflicted with peace, as in the case of loans for armaments to foreign governments, he opposed free trade. "No free trade in cutting throats." It was because of his starting-point that he could come to believe that free trade would be a means to peace: he never secured from businessmen the support for his peace programme that they gave to his proposals for free trade."

"It was Cobden who really set the argument on its legs: and it is futile to compare any other man with him as the father of our system of Free Trade."

"The principle he laid down was that, whatever course other nations might choose to take, a policy of Free Trade was always the best. It appeared to him that the refusal of other nations to buy from us on equal terms was no reason in the world why we should refuse to buy from them. Buying and selling are but two sides of one and the same transaction, and if we managed to buy from them, it is certain that they would be obliged, directly or indirectly, to buy from us in return. The high duties imposed by their tariffs would be paid by their own people on every article imposed."

"The motive which inspired those who composed the assemblage was twofold. They wished to show their admiration of, and their gratitude towards, a great Englishman whose sympathetic heart, wisdom, intuition, courage, and praise-worthy eloquence wrought for them a great deliverance in the days of their fathers. They also wished to declare their adherence to the doctrines which he taught, and their determination that the power of those doctrines should not, God helping them, be impaired. What they owed to him and to themselves was to make it clear in the sight of all men that they meant to hold fast to the heritage which he, perhaps more than any other individual, won for them; and that the fruits of the battle which he waged against tremendous odds should not be lightly wrested from them. They were not there to acclaim Cobden as an inspired prophet, but they saw in him a great citizen, a great statesman, a great patriot, and a great and popular leader... Cobden spent his life in pulling down those artificial restrictions and obstructions which at the present time rash and reckless men were seeking to set up again—obstructions not merely to commerce, but also to peace and good will, and mutual understanding; yes, and obstructions to liberty and good government at home. Those who expressed astonishment that the intelligent workman did not look askance at the manufacturer, Cobden, had overlooked the fact that he gave the people cheap food and abundant employment, and did far more—that he exploded the economic basis of class government and class subjection."

"Cobden was the most persuasive speaker I ever listened to. His voice wanted richness. It was a little too harsh & thin—but his manner was winning. He had great tact, & always conciliated his audience. He was a very amiable man, & extremely well informed. No man entered the House of Commons with a greater prejudice against him among the Country gentlemen, yet in time, he quite overcame it. He was naturally well-bred, because he was considerate for the feelings of others, which is the true course of good breeding. He was modest without being humble—never elated by his great success."

"The verdict of posterity will be... that he [Cobden] was the greatest political character that the pure middle class of this country has yet produced."

"Nations have not yet learnt to bear prosperity, liberty, and peace. They will learn it in a higher state of civilization. We think we are the models for posterity, when we are little better than beacons to help it to avoid the rocks and quicksands. The world is sadly slow to learn..."

"'Tis a great sin for man or woman To steal a goose from off a common; But Who shall plead that man's excuse Who steals the common from the goose!"

"I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage in his book on Political Economy in which he favours the principle of Protection in young communities, has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings."

"[T]he principles of political economy have elevated the working class above the place they ever filled before."