Lee Iacocca Quotes

Safety doesn’t sell.

Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then...do something. Don't just stand there, make it happen.

My father always used
to say that when you die,
if you've got five real friends,
then you've had a great life.

But engineering no longer interested me. The day I’d arrived, they had me designing a clutch spring. It had taken me an entire day to make a detailed drawing of it, and I said to myself: “What on earth am I doing? Is this how I want to be spending the rest of my life?” I wanted to stay at Ford, but not in engineering. I was eager to be where the real action was — marketing or sales. I liked working with people more than machines.

What are your objectives for the next ninety days? What are your plans, your priorities, your hopes? And how do you intend to go about achieving them?

Get all the education you can then go out and do something - do anything.

I began by reducing my own salary to $ 1.00 a year. Leadership means setting an example. When you find yourself in a position of leadership, people follow your every move. I don’t mean they invade your privacy, although there’s some of that, too. But when the leader talks, people listen. And when the leader acts, people watch. So you have to be careful about everything you say and everything you do.

But I do think that our national leadership consists of too many lawyers and not enough people from business. I’d like to see a system where we brought in twenty top managers to run the business side of the country and maybe even paid them $1 million a year, tax-free. That would be a real incentive, and then we’d see a lot more talented people interested in public life.

It’s a good thing God doesn’t let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself.

The trouble with you, Phil, is that you went to Harvard, where they taught you not to take any action until you’ve got all the facts. You’ve got ninety-five percent of them, but it’s going to take you another six months to get that last five percent. And by the time you do, your facts will be out of date because the market has moved on you. That’s what life is all about — timing.

Mistakes are a part of life; you can’t avoid them. All you can hope is that they won’t be too expensive and that you don’t make the same mistake twice.

We were on a joyride, on free energy almost. [...] It seems to me we need something like the Manhattan Project. We need some urgency saying, "Here's what we should be doing. We've got to get off fossil fuels."

The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.

There’s a world of difference between a strong ego, which is essential, and a large ego — which can be destructive. The guy with a strong ego knows his own strengths. He’s confident. He has a realistic idea of what he can accomplish, and he moves purposefully toward his goal. But the guy with a large ego is always looking for recognition. He constantly needs to be patted on the back. He thinks he’s a cut above everybody else. And he talks down to the people who work for him.

Charlie Beacham used to say that once a guy is over twenty-one, you’ll never really change his style or his habits. You may think you can, but his self-image is locked in. Nobody is ever humble enough to learn after he’s grown up.