Eli Broad Quotes
112 Eli Broad Quotes
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Economically and personally, there couldn’t have been a worse time to start a new business than 1956, the year I launched what ultimately became a Fortune 500 company. The first major downturn of the postwar era – the so-called Eisenhower recession – was about to start, and the homebuilding market was already jittery. Edye and I were expected our first child. We had a mortgage. I had lost my $67.40-a-week accounting job…
Eli Broad
Reasonable people treat conventional wisdom with respect. Those of us who are unreasonable regard it as an expression of the herd instinct. It’s a fine quality for sheep – creatures that usually end up getting sheared – but not for entrepreneurs.
Eli Broad
Most successful businesses have to begin by bucking conventional wisdom.
Eli Broad
Someone certainly told Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com that no one would buy a book without picking it up and looking at it in a store…
Eli Broad
[On building houses without basements] We asked, ‘Why not?’ The answer produced our first big idea: no basements… If we skipped building them, we could put up homes faster and sell them for less than our competitors.
Eli Broad
In our first year of business, we sold 120 houses, generating $1.7 million in revenue for our new company. That was a long way from scraping by as a $67.40-a-week accountant.
Eli Broad
Successful companies innovate constantly…
Eli Broad
When you’re on a winning streak, it’s easy to think it will last forever. It won’t. It never does.
Eli Broad
It’s important to pay attention to the lessons of history and know the realities of your industry.
Eli Broad
While investors bid up Kaufman and Broad’s stock, we bought a small life insurance company to help stabilize earnings during downturns in the housing market. The biggest housing slump since the Great Depression hit three years later, and that acquisition, Sun Life Insurance Company of America, pulled us through.
Eli Broad
[On moving from life insurance and towards retirement savings in the form of annuities] We decided that instead of thinking like an insurer, we should think like a bank.
Eli Broad
I was unreasonable enough to ask fundamental questions about unexamined assumptions. We came up with ways to reimagine our businesses. A real estate company became a manufacturer and a life insurer become a bank. Both became Fortune 500 companies. That’s the value of unconventional insight.
Eli Broad
Being stingy with your time is the key to working 24/7 but still getting 8 hours of sleep, as I do almost every night.
Eli Broad
I never play golf because it takes too long…
Eli Broad
I never stay anywhere – parties, museums, meetings – longer than 3 hours… In my view, there aren’t many things that need to last more than 3 hours.
Eli Broad
Hiring the best young employees is a lot easier than keeping them.
Eli Broad
The… most important thing I give young employees: I promise them hard work and high expectations all the time. Some employers thing the young are allergic to hard work or that they’ll slavishly put in 16-hour days because they don’t have families yet. Neither is quite correct. Younger employees simply have fewer preconceived ideas of what they can and can’t do.
Eli Broad
Leveraging isn’t just about money.
Eli Broad
If you’re a teacher, I admire you, and you already know the power of leverage. You devote your time and energy to educating children, who grow up to be innovative, productive, and philanthropic adults. Every hour you give, the world will get back many times over. The value of that effort is priceless.
Eli Broad
[On selling door-to-door] Nothing teaches perseverance like forcing yourself to knock on another door after one slams into your nose.
Eli Broad
If you’re in the way, move.
Eli Broad
Ruffled feathers should never get in the way of anything you really believe in and want to do… If you stay the course, you’ll be surprised at how quickly success wins people over, no matter what they think of you.
Eli Broad
To me, money is a means to do good. I reached a point in my life where I had enjoyed tremendous business success that afforded my family everything we could possibly want. My wife and I then decided that we could use our wealth to make a difference. So we created the Broad Foundations to do four things: to improve urban public education, to support innovative scientific and medical research, to foster art appreciation for audiences worldwide and to support initiatives in Los Angeles.
Eli Broad
Los Angeles is a meritocracy. It’s one of the few cities you can move to without the right family background, the right religious background, the right political background, and if you work hard and have good ideas, you’re accepted.
Eli Broad
[On the Museum of Contemporary Art] My days as an innocent collector came to an end, when I got involved with MOCA.
Eli Broad
[On the Museum of Contemporary Art] I didn’t want MOCA to be a provincial museum, I wanted it to be a national or international museum. In order to do that, we had to overfly New York. We had to get a director of international note…
Eli Broad
My father’s side was very outgoing, poor, aggressive, and entrepreneurial. [On his mother she ] Was disciplined, more conservative and so on. She was not a risk taker. My father was a big risk taker.
Eli Broad
[As a 17 year old to his future wife Edye] I don’t want to be in school anymore. I want to get out and get going and make money.
Eli Broad
[On using the methods of mass production to build 600 houses in the Detroit suburbs] It was like the Japanese auto industry versus America’s in the ‘70s. Our competitors thought they knew it all and we young whippersnappers were going to go broke.
Eli Broad
I remember staying up many nights, going over everything. I watched every penny. It didn’t come down to counting every nail – but very close.
Eli Broad
I’m someone who’s far more respected than loved.
Eli Broad
[On whether he would like to be loved?] It would be nice, but I’m more single-mined. I’m more interested in getting things done in the civic arena, more concerned with that than if I made a thousand new friends.
Eli Broad
All’s well that ends well.
Eli Broad
[On his sons in 2003] they saw how hard their father worked and how much time he spent away from his family. They never had the thirst to do things I did. They lead a good, balanced life, rather than coming from a humble beginning and crawling their way out like I did.
Eli Broad
[On spending time with artists like David Salle and Jeff Hoons] If I spent all my time with businessmen and bankers, I’d have a very narrow view of our society and the world.
Eli Broad
I’ve always been a risk taker. But I’ve always been able to look at the downside and never bet the farm. We’ve done things that haven’t worked out, but we’ve had a lot more winners than losers.
Eli Broad
I’m not one who has a clean desk. Every stack has a purpose.
Eli Broad
[On the US in 2011] I am worried about this country. Education is where it starts in my view. We used to be number one in [the high school graduation rate among developed countries]; now we are number eighteen. We read in the national press how poorly our kids are doing: a 50 percent graduation rate in most urban areas. In Detroit it is 28 percent. Unless we do better, we are in deep trouble compared to what is happening in Korea, Japan, India, China, and some other countries. Look at their trajectory versus ours and you know they are going to come out ahead of us… This is a great country. We’ve got great innovation and so on, but we haven’t done well in other areas.
Eli Broad
If you’re a CEO and you have great people who are very bright and very challenging, you can’t inspire them the way you can an athletic team, whether it’s before the game or at half-time. You do some of that. But it’s also about having a clear mission that the team believes can be accomplished. They need a leader who has won a lot of games in the past, and they want to be on that team.
Eli Broad
Unless they have to, people will not stick with a loser. If you want to get the best and brightest people, they are going to want to be with someone who is a winner.
Eli Broad
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