Quotes By Lee Iacocca

It was emotional when Chrysler sold out to the Germans.

There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.

In a corporation, there can only be one guy in the end: the CEO.

There are times when even the best manager is like the little boy with the big dog, waiting to see where the dog wants to go so he can take him there.

I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That's a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.

We at Chrysler borrow money the old-fashioned way. We pay it back.

The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better.

Talk to people in their own language. If you do it well, they'll say, 'God, he said exactly what I was thinking.' And when they begin to respect you, they'll follow you to the death.

People want economy and they will pay any price to get it.

I was at Ford for 32 years. I went to Chrysler in 1978, four or five months after I got canned by Henry Ford.

You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere.

I have always found that if I move with seventy-five percent or more of the facts that I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.

To succeed today, you have to set priorities, decide what you stand for.

I forgot to shake hands and be friendly. It was an important lesson about leadership.

Every business and every product has risks. You can't get around it.

Any supervisor worth his salt would rather deal with people who attempt too much than with those who try too little.

I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.

The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.

The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do - they always reach.

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.

I've always found that the speed of the boss is the speed of the team.

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

We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.

Decisiveness is the one word that makes a good manager.

So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late.

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

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

In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits.

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