Lee Iacocca Quotes

In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. People come first. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.

I always kept in mind my father’s warning: “If he’s bigger than you are, don’t fight back. Use your head instead of your fists.

If I had to sum up in one word the qualities that make a good manager, I’d say that it all comes down to decisiveness.

Formal learning can teach you a great deal, but many of the essential skills in life are the ones you have to develop on your own.

Although I was never a candidate, I learned a lot from all the presidential talk. Shortly after the whole business began, I was having a conversation with a guy in advertising. He said something interesting: “I’ve decided why everybody talks about you as a presidential candidate. It’s very simple. They don’t believe anybody anymore. You talk to them and you make them believe that you stand for something and then you pursue it. You don’t bullshit them, and the American public has been bullshitted too often.

Safety doesn’t sell.

It pains me to see my old company, which has meant so much to America, on the ropes. But Chrysler has been in trouble before, and we got through it, and I believe they can do it again. [...] Let's face it, if your car breaks down, you're not going to take it to the White House to get fixed. But, if your company breaks down, you've got to go to the experts on the ground, not the bureaucrats.

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."

We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic.

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.

Why don’t we pass a law that says when you borrow money to buy somebody else and cannibalize him, the interest payments on those loans are not deductible? That would get the excesses out of the system pretty fast. Right now, if you want to buy up a competitor, generally you can’t. That would violate the antitrust laws. But if you want to buy a company that does something else entirely, that’s okay. Where’s the sense in that?

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.

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?

But McNamara knew more than the actual facts — he also knew the hypothetical ones. When you talked with him, you realized that he had already played out in his head the relevant details for every conceivable option and scenario.

You can aim at a duck and get it in your sights, but the duck is always moving. In order to hit the duck, you have to move your gun. But a committee faced with a major decision can’t always move as quickly as the events it’s trying to respond to. By the time the committee is ready to shoot, the duck has flown away.