Donald Keough Quotes
101 Donald Keough Quotes (Don Keough, Coca-Cola, Donald R Keough, Allen & Company)
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To quit taking risks is a serious risk!
Donald Keough
Companies are artificial constructs. A company doesn’t fail to do anything. Individuals do…
Donald Keough
To create profits in the long term requires innovation in the short term.
Donald Keough
We can never pass enough laws to make men ethical.
Donald Keough
You cannot build a strong and lasting business on a rotten foundation.
Donald Keough
Once you make a decision, you should move forward and never look back.
Donald Keough
I would get very uncomfortable from time to time at The Coca-Cola Company whenever things seemed to be going awfully well. Like the Russians say, ‘Having things too good is also not good.’
Donald Keough
One step toward failure, unchecked, leads to another.
Donald Keough
Isn’t there something more we ought to be worrying about today in order to make sure we have something else to worry about tomorrow?
Donald Keough
The inventions of mankind that seem the most remarkable to me are those that we simply take for granted because, now that we have them, they seem so obvious. Who, thousands of years ago, came up with the idea of money… What a great idea…
Donald Keough
A major component of happiness in the business world is finding something you love doing, whatever it might be, and then finding a way to do it.
Donald Keough
To have success you have to have a high level of unadulterated desire to get up and go to work.
Donald Keough
The way it is with great companies and smart people… No matter what happens they are never mired in failure. They fall but always find ways to pick themselves up and move on.
Donald Keough
If a company never has a failure, I submit that their management is probably not discontented enough to justify their salaries.
Donald Keough
When you're comfortable, the temptation to quit taking risks is so great, it'd almost irresistible. And failure is almost inevitable.
Donald Keough
[In February 1993] We’re paid to take risks.
Donald Keough
The task of leaders in business is to convince the people who work for you that what you are suggesting for them is in their best interest.
Donald Keough
I have always been afraid of the word success. People, companies and countries can get into trouble when they start to think they’re successful. They get arrogant.
Donald Keough
[In January 2009] There are dozen’s of opportunities out there always… I’d say that right now is a very good time to invest.
Donald Keough
I’ve always been curious about the future…
Donald Keough
You don’t learn to swim until you get into the water.
Donald Keough
[(On how to failure in business so do the opposite.) The ten commandments for business failure.] Quit taking risks. Be inflexible. Isolate yourself. Assume infallibility. Play the game close to the foul line. Don’t take the time to think. Put all your faith in experts and outside consultants. Love your bureaucracy. Send mixed messages. Be afraid of the future. Lose your passion for work – for life.
Donald Keough
After a lifetime in business, I’ve never been able to develop a set of rules or a step-by-step formula that will guarantee success in anything, much less in a field as dynamic and changing as business.
Donald Keough
When I was asked to talk about how to win, my response was I couldn’t do that. What I could do, however was to talk about how to lose and I offered a guarantee that anyone who followed my formula would a highly successful loser.
Donald Keough
When you achieve something, even very little, there is the great temptation to quit taking risks.
Donald Keough
[On Roberto Goizueta] He was in fact my boss and one of the most brilliant leaders in American business history. In 1981, the market value of the company was $4 billion and when he died in 1997 it was $145 billion.
Donald Keough
A company doesn’t fail to do anything. Individuals do, and when you probe a bit you usually find that failure lies not in a litany of strategic mistakes – though they all may be present in one form or another – but the real fault lies, as Shakespeare noted, in ourselves, the leaders of the business.
Donald Keough
Businesses are the product and extension of the personal characteristics of its leaders – the lengthened shadows of the men and women who run them.
Donald Keough
In 1900, American families spent nearly twice as much on funerals as they did on medicine. Somehow they prevailed. Against a background of overcoming challenges like those our ancestors overcame makes a day, any day, at the office a walk in the park.
Donald Keough
As our lives get softer and richer and more comfortable, the temptation to quit taking risks is so great. It’s one of the major diseases of success.
Donald Keough
[On compared to four out of five new businesses failing.] Equally difficult., and sometimes more so, is to undertake a risk from a position of substantial ongoing success – to undertake a risk when there is considerable evidence that it might not even be necessary.
Donald Keough
I am not an expert in the science of risk assessment. In my experience, the main prerequisite for exploring the possibility of the need to take a new or greater risk was the unsettled feeling that things ought to be better, that the future was indeed in some jeopardy unless we took some action – even worse, that we were missing an opportunity.
Donald Keough
I must have irritated quite a few people when, with considerable regularity, I’d go around asking our top people, ‘Tell me again why everything is so good. Isn’t there something more we ought to be worrying about today in order to make sure we have something else to worry about tomorrow?’
Donald Keough
A proud company, built on technological innovation, so swept up in its success with one kind of product that it completely failed to take a risk on new opportunities springing up within its own ranks… They ignored the simple truth that to create profits in the long term requires innovation in the short term.
Donald Keough
The way forward will always generate some failures.
Donald Keough
Customers are frequently troublesome. You can always blame whatever goes wrong on them!
Donald Keough
Soon after I was elected president of The Coca-Cola Company, I was the subject of some profiles in business publications. I hardly recognized myself. I was either a white knight to help lead the company or I was the living embodiment of the famous Peter Principle, promoted beyond my level of competence.
Donald Keough
Everyone likes recognition, but one has to be careful not to be seduced by our cult of celebrity and tempted to cross over the line of ethical behavior.
Donald Keough
After every burst of business scandal in this country, it seems that we create additional regulations…
Donald Keough
People can rise up to do extraordinary things. And they can fall far and fast.
Donald Keough
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