Donald Keough Quotes
101 Donald Keough Quotes
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I was proud of the fact that The Coca-Cola Company always had a corporate culture founded on trust and the absolute necessity of doing the right thing.
Donald Keough
To maintain public confidence in our capitalist system it must be managed by men and women of honor and decency. I am deeply troubled by the study at Rutgers indicating that of all graduate students, MBA students are the most likely to cheat.
Donald Keough
The real world is where you must decide ethical issues on a daily basis.
Donald Keough
[On his father] He was raised with the Midwestern value that your word is your bond, and a man’s handshake is as good as all the contracts in lawyerdom. My father would have agreed with Peter Drucker that there is no such thing as business ethics. Just ethics.
Donald Keough
My father always said that he slept very well. I suspect the old adage is true – ‘A quiet conscience sleeps in thunder.’
Donald Keough
Doing something with technology just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should do it. We frequently add to the complexity of life without gaining any discernible advantage…
Donald Keough
There is a great difference between prudent caution regarding the future and unbridled fear of that future.
Donald Keough
Television is the greatest gift to pessimism since Malthus himself.
Donald Keough
When you focus on the failures of the world day in and day out, it shapes your whole attitude toward life and the future. I’ve always liked the old couplet, attributed sometimes to Robert Louis Stevenson, sometimes just to Anonymous: ‘Two men looked out through prison bars. One saw mud and one saw stars.’ A tilt of the head, an attitude, it makes all the difference how you shape your world.
Donald Keough
The news business has never been about good news.
Donald Keough
There should be bread, but roses too.
Donald Keough
The old saying ‘Tell me what you love and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true. Love has been around a long time.
Donald Keough
Warren Buffett says, ‘I tap-dance to work every day.’ That has been my philosophy as well.
Donald Keough
Rallying the troops is not telling people to have more fun. It’s telling them to work harder because they are capable of doing better.
Donald Keough
If you really want to fail, lose that passion for whatever it is you’re doing.
Donald Keough
Most people have a strong desire – a passion – to achieve something worthwhile, even when the odds are against them. Give them a significant piece of the puzzle and they will try to solve it for you.
Donald Keough
In any business, if a worthwhile challenge is given to employees and presented with passionate enthusiasm and if they are shown how their own passionate dedication and talent can be applied to meet that challenge, in my experience a vital sense of excitement will flow like electricity throughout the business.
Donald Keough
Passion in one area sparks passion in other areas. It is contagious and leads to new ideas and new energy.
Donald Keough
[On Warren Buffett] He is the world’s greatest simplifier. Take complex economic theories or business problems and in a biblical way, he makes easily understood parables out of them. He is everyone’s hero, including mine.
Donald Keough
Watch out for bright lights that surround themselves with dim bulbs!
Donald Keough
Unethical men and women can flourish for periods, sometimes very long periods, but ultimately their lack of morality - and their lack of humility - destroys them.
Donald Keough
If you want to get nothing done, make sure that administrative concerns take precedence over all others! Love your bureaucracy!
Donald Keough
My father took me aside and told me, ‘When you are buying anything, examine the merchandise and pay very little attention to the presentation of it.’ Throughout my career, that simple thought was always in the back of my mind.
Donald Keough
[On working for The Coca-Cola Company.] I have often said, I jumped into a little creek, which became a river, which turned into a gulf, which grew into an ocean. All I ever did was swim.
Donald Keough
All the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people.
Donald Keough
The passion for original Coca-Cola – and that is the world for it, passion – was something that caught us by surprise. It is a wonderful American mystery, a lovely American enigma, and you cannot measure it any more than you can measure love, pride or patriotism.
Donald Keough
Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake, some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.
Donald Keough
[In April 1985] I had five small kids and left for work every day. [Warren] Buffett had three and stayed home. He had a marvelous hobby, model trains, and my kids used to troop over there and play with them. One day [In 1960], Warren popped over and asked if I’d through about how I was going to educate these kids. In truth, I hadn’t given it much thought. But I told him I planned to work hard and see what happened. Warren said that if I gave him $5,000 to invest, he’d probably be able to do better [for me.]. My wife and I talked it over, but we figured we didn’t know what this guy did for a living – how could we give him $5,000? We’ve been kicking ourselves ever since. I mean, if we had given him the dough, we could have owned a college by now.
Donald Keough
[In February 1993] Coke is the star, perhaps the only one that won’t talk back to you.
Donald Keough
You never get real creativity without a modest amount of pain.
Donald Keough
The first lesson I learned was don’t lie, be single-minded, tell the truth. Don’t tell anyone anything other than the truth.
Donald Keough
The only money Coke makes is in that simple transaction where someone buys a Coke or another of our drinks. You can never lose sight of that no matter how high up the corporate ladder you are climbing. Keep it simple, remember the customer, that is what I always tried to do.
Donald Keough
I always believed that you have to have people at the top who are passionate about their company, and that then is communicated down through the ranks. You can’t order good moral in a company. You can’t say ‘effective Monday we will have good morale.’ It is only when someone believes in the mission, when they have the psychic income to believe that they are part of it.
Donald Keough
[As President of The Coca-Cola Company] I say I’m just here to sell a coke, day after day, as many as I can.
Donald Keough
I know in a big organization what comes out of the mouths of leaders gets watered down as it goes through the company. You have to be very clear and precise about what you want.
Donald Keough
I said to Roberto [Goizueta] something like, ‘You know this thing is up in the air. We are both obviously prime candidates and one of us will be picked as chairman. We should immediately agree that we want to work as a team and whoever gets the chairman’s job will choose the other as president.’ It was that simple. I’m sure he saw the relief in my eyes that I saw in his. We touched hands and that was it, it was sealed. I never doubted that Roberto would live up to that pact.
Donald Keough
The word ‘success’ has always made me nervous, because I believe built into that word are a couple of viruses – arrogance and complacency – and left unchecked, they can ensure failure.
Donald Keough
If you watch a tennis match, it is the mistakes that determine who is going to win.
Donald Keough
It still takes a rare CEO to say: ‘I am not going to pay attention to my quarterly results. I am going to run the company on the basis of long-term return to my shareholders.
Donald Keough
When I was 15 or 16 years old, I got a job buying bulls to ship to processing plants back East. I worked for a man named Doyle Harmon, and my first day on the job, he chastised me for paying too much. He chastised me for paying too much. He said ‘Concentrate on the bull, not on the language of selling.’ I’ve made most of the mistakes in my career by not concentrating on the bull.
Donald Keough
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