Businesses face pressure to grow and evolve rapidly to stay competitive. But growth can be difficult, and even the most intrepid among us sometimes need an extra dose of inspiration.
We’ve rounded up 50 quotes about business growth and advice for success to inspire you and spark new ideas. Have a favourite quote that we missed? Click to tweet and add yours.
Recent quotes from business leaders in 2024
“Just as every company became a software company, we now live in a moment where every company must become an AI company. Cracking the code of AI transformation must be CEO-driven.” – Thomas Dohmke, CEO at GitHub (Source)
“We don’t win until our customers say we win.” – Mary Barra, CEO at General Motors (Source)
“If we don’t understand people, we don’t understand business.” – Simon Sinek, CEO at The Optimism Company (Source)
“What leaders have to do is take themselves on and have the courage to say ‘I have more to learn’.” – Simon Sinek, CEO at The Optimism Company (Source)
“The best leaders are the ones who are disproportionately self-aware and have the ability to be the bigger person when the going gets tough”. – Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia (Source)
“My job as CEO is to put players in the position to succeed.” – Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia (Source)
“When you’re a leader, you work for your team. They don’t work for you.” – Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia (Source)
“Steve showed us that the future isn’t something you wait for — it’s something you build.” – Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc (Source)
“It’s time to challenge the outdated assumptions on who can and can’t contribute to a workplace — everyone has potential and deserves the chance to try and fulfil it.” – Richard Branson, Founder of The Virgin Group (Source)
“As an entrepreneur, failure becomes an opportunity to learn. Show me somebody who has never failed and I’ll show you somebody who has never tried.” – Richard Branson, Founder of The Virgin Group (Source)
“Success isn’t about avoiding failure; it’s about growing from it. Stop repeating the same mistakes, and eventually, you’ll find success.” – Neil Patel, Cofounder at Neil Patel Digital (Source)
Quotes about business growth and change
“Becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.” – Michelle Obama, from Becoming
“Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” – Phil Knight, founder, Nike
“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.” – Sigmund Freud, neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis
“Motivation is the catalysing ingredient for every successful innovation.” – Clayton Christensen, economist and Harvard professor
“Every problem is a gift — without problems we would not grow.” – Tony Robbins, motivational speaker and writer
“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” – John F. Kennedy, 35th U.S. president
“Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.” – Napoleon Hill, author
“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.” – Andy Rooney, broadcast journalist
“Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom.” – William George Jordan, writer/editor
“The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, writer/statesman
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” – Anaïs Nin, writer
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T.S. Eliot, author
“The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.” – Sergey Brin, co-founder, Google
“If you don’t build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs.” – Dhirubhai Ambani, founder, Reliance Industries
“I do not know the word ‘quit.’ Either I never did, or I have abolished it.” – Susan Butcher, sled dog racer
“To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart.” – Thomas Watson, Sr., former chairman and CEO, IBM
“It’s very easy to be different but very difficult to be better.” – Jonathan Ive, former chief design officer, Apple
“Almost everything worthwhile carries with it some sort of risk, whether it’s starting a new business, whether it’s leaving home, whether it’s getting married, or whether it’s flying in space.” – Chris Hadfield, astronaut
“Happy employees lead to happy customers, which leads to more profits.” – Vaughn Aust, COO, Gemini
“Employees want to feel inspired by their leaders…hire individuals who will lead by example.” – Jody Kohner, EVP global enablement, Salesforce
“Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it.” – William Durant, co-founder, General Motors
“Many companies get trapped by the paradox of hitting numbers ‘now’ versus improving sales for future quarters or years ahead.” – Tiffani Bova, growth and innovation evangelist, Salesforce
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu, Chinese Taoist philosopher
Quotes about business transformation
“[Businesses] rarely come up for air to re-evaluate how they are selling. This means that current sales practices, process, and organisational structure may in fact be hindering their growth more than any external factor they believe they are facing.” – Tiffani Bova, growth and innovation evangelist, Salesforce
“Consumers now expect to be able to get things, talk to someone, and do what they want at any time. That’s led to a divide. Some companies and products provide such a perfect, seamless experience that it has raised the bar. In fact, it’s so easy and seamless that we kind of forget to be impressed. But what they’re doing is making the ones that don’t deliver that kind of great experience all the more obvious.” — Susan Weinschenk, chief behavioural scientist and CEO, The Team W
“Customer experience professionals love to think about their customer journey maps, but these can be very rigid. How many consumers follow the same exact path to get to their outcome? Very few. I believe consumer experiences need to be far more dynamic than they are today — not just personalised, which we’ve been talking about for a few years. After all, companies can leverage data about customers in the moment — what they did in the last 24 minutes or hours, not in the last 24 days.” — Tom Puthiyamadam, transformation consulting leader, PwC [read the full interview]
“We’ve been talking about the importance of ‘customer-centricity’ for some time. But until now retailers have lacked both the technology and the mandate to connect marketing, sales, service, and commerce systems to enable a 360-degree view of the customer. Now that relevant and personalised engagement has emerged as a key differentiator, retailers will finally make the investments to deliver on the promise of putting the customer at the centre of everything they do.” — Rob Garf, vice president and general manager, retail, Salesforce
“Companies that invest more in digital transformation actually outperform their peers over time. These companies are more prepared for disruption, better able to monetise new digital channels, and better able to build a bigger user base. What’s more, this phenomenon exists regardless of industry.” — Geoff Cubitt, CEO and founder, Cardinal Griffin, LLC
“Data itself is not enough to create personalised experiences. Artificial intelligence is required to turn a comprehensive data trove into insights that can anticipate customers’ needs and act as their digital assistant. Much like his or her pre-industrial counterpart, a B2I (business-to-individual) virtual tailor, for example, would know each individual’s measurements and tastes in fabrics, styles, and other variables, and could thus make highly personalised recommendations.” — Peter Schwartz, senior vice president, strategic planning, Salesforce [read the full article]
Quotes about the artificial intelligence impact on business growth
“Accenture forecasts that AI could double the economic growth rates of 12 major countries by 2035. These gains will come from computers doing what they have always been good at — freeing us to make better use of our time. For instance, AI makes it possible to automate routine tasks such as responding to simple customer questions. It can also be used to spot changes in customer preferences, identify visual problems in manufacturing, further automate agriculture, identify fraud, and better inform business decision-making.” — Richard Socher, CEO, You.com [read the full article]
“AI is about more than replacing each worker with a robot. It will involve the disruption and reshaping of whole industries. Business models will evolve to be quite transparent. In a world of AI, consumers will have high access to information, perhaps using their digital assistant to find the best price or analyse which product has received the best reviews. It will no longer be possible to use information asymmetry to charge people a disproportionate amount.” — Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO, Sinovation Ventures
“Imagine a customer walking up to a supermarket shelf and holding his or her smartphone up against different bags of potato chips. Using image processing, language processing, and analytics, AI-enabled systems can help that customer check which brand is best for their low-sodium diet, or whatever their taste profile might be.” — Glen Hartman, president and co-founder, Accenture Interactive [read the full interview]
“You don’t need to know how the technology of a microwave works to use it — it is simply a tool. We’re now entering the same phase with AI, thanks to the influx of no-code, point-and-click tools. AI will become a widely used utility by everyone, regardless of technical background. As a result, most of the AI applications in the coming years will be built by people with little or no AI training.” — Vitaly Gordon, co-founder and CEO, Faros AI
“Companies use technologies such as deep learning to help them feed their computer networks vast quantities of information so they recognise patterns more quickly. But for all their enormous potential, current success is based on fitting to patterns of historical training data. There’s still much work to do to train models how to reason. They can only be trained to find patterns in historical data. The problem is this training data isn’t neutral — it can easily reflect the biases of the people who put it together. It can encode trends and patterns that reflect and perpetuate prejudice and harmful stereotypes.” — Timnit Gebru, founder and executive director, The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), [read the full interview]
Quotes about growing workplace trends
“Workers will need different skills to thrive in the workplace of the future. We’ll see a growing demand for advanced technological skills such as programming. Social, emotional, and higher cognitive skills — such as creativity, critical thinking, and complex information processing — will also be in demand. Growing occupations, meanwhile, will include those with difficult-to-automate activities, such as managers and doctors, as well as care workers and teachers. Training and retraining mid-career workers and new generations for the coming challenges will be another imperative.” — James Manyika, senior vice president, Google-Alphabet [read the full interview]
“In 1950, only 55% of the working-age population in the U.S. was employed. By 2015, that percentage had risen to 60% — representing a net increase of about 100 million jobs — after many potentially job-killing technologies had been introduced. These included shipping cranes, ATMs, and personal computer spreadsheets. The same could well be true of [AI], especially if we put into place the innovations in education that could help people adapt.” — Peter Schwartz, senior vice president, strategic planning, Salesforce [read the full article]
“AI is about enabling machines to augment humans — in other words, to complement human skills — rather than merely replace them. In most cases, AI’s skills are different to a human’s, so we are moving towards a symbiosis of the two.” — Robin Bordoli, partner, Authentic Ventures
“Beyond doing the right thing for their workers, companies have another reason to lean into workforce development initiatives: their own competitiveness. As demand for skills for the intelligent era heat up, so too will a war for talent.” — Sarah Franklin, CMO, Salesforce
“The shift to lifelong learning is absolutely essential. As the pace of technological change quickens, we need to be sure that employees are keeping up with the right skills to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. That applies to both technical and soft skills. There will be changes in both areas.” — Zvika Krieger, technology advisor and former director of responsible innovation at Facebook
