James Goldsmith Quotes
101 James Goldsmith Quotes
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[On problems in 1957 when the business was growing well.] The crisis was a lack of financial knowledge…
James Goldsmith
When you’re running a small business you run it yourself. It’s hand’s on – it’s lovely, it’s one of the most delightful things of all, you really run all aspects… You do it all yourself… As a company grows bigger you have to delegate. It a major educational process a great transformation from wanting to do everything yourself, to being able to trust people and delegate to them without abandoning them by keeping control of strategy but delegating execution of strategy. That is a big metamorphosis.
James Goldsmith
I prefer people with no family background, no privilege…
James Goldsmith
I’ve never been a good negotiator, I’m not a good negotiator. So the key principles in my life has been to pick good negotiators and leave them to it under my control. [On why he considers he is not a good negotiator.] I probably too impatient, it’s not a talent that I have and therefore I recognised that twenty years ago. I always had someone negotiating on my behalf and I would stay in the background and I would guide them.
James Goldsmith
[On how to make people motivated who worked for him.] By making them capitalists. In other words the people who run our businesses have always had a significant stake of ownership in the business with us… I’m a great believer in ownership.
James Goldsmith
I’m no good in hi-tech things.
James Goldsmith
The main businesses that I’ve been successful in have been relatively simple businesses.
James Goldsmith
[On retail in the 1970’s] You had Televisions being sold next to Tuna Fish because they were alphabetically correct in that order. There was no concept of quality.
James Goldsmith
[On changing supermarkets in the 1970’s back to tribal marketplaces like in the Far East.] We decided to convert these stores into marketplaces. And we designed a new form of marketplace. We brought in bakers and fish mongers and butchers, greengrocers and all the things that have disappeared behind plastic packs… We created a new formula. In the first year we promptly lost $100 million and thought we might have got it wrong and almost went bust. And then it turned around and became a huge success. I was in that business for 15 or 16 years and it was an enormous success in the end but it was converting an old formula which had been in the 50’s and converting plastic into a live marketplace. And it worked not just in New York and Los Angeles, it worked right deep in the American provincial towns. Who were delighted to find fresh fish and live fish…
James Goldsmith
[On one of the impetuses for changing the existing supermarket formula.] The main thing was I could not buy my own food at my own supermarkets and I thought this was extremely illogical. It was very simple to work out.
James Goldsmith
[On how important in business are ‘Luck, Timing and Fear.’] Vital all three. Strip away any one and you’re in real trouble.
James Goldsmith
[On the importance of timing in what he did in his supermarkets.] If we’d done the same thing ten years before we would have failed. If we’d done the same thing ten years later we would have been too late others would have done it.
James Goldsmith
Timing in financial markets. If you take on debt at the wrong time and interest rates go up you get into trouble.
James Goldsmith
Timing like most things is a mixture of experience, in other words learning from practice and intuition which I suppose genetic or you’re born with a talent… Experience is probably the single most important ingredient.
James Goldsmith
[On getting his timing right majestically in 1973 and in 1987.] I was a bear on both of those occasions. Perhaps more importantly I got it right in 1981. [‘A boom?’] A boom yes. [‘Was that experience?’] I think so – yes.
James Goldsmith
[On being considered to have taken a lot of ‘risks’ in his life and how to draw the dividing line on the acceptable risks.] First you have to take risks. There nothing for nothing. You’ve got to be able to take a risk and you’ve got to be able to work it through. There’s no short-cuts. No short-cuts on the amount of work that you put into it, the amount of worry you put into it and there are very few short-cuts in so far as risk is concerned if you want to achieve – if you want to succeed.
James Goldsmith
Risk is a disagreeable thing. Some people become addicted to risk. Some people actually enjoy the feeling of risk. Gamblers do that… A lot of businessmen get a thrill by being over-extended. You can become addicted to risk. I personally hate risk. I’m willing to take risk for a very particular purpose, at a very particular point in time, but once I’m at risk I want to get out of risk as soon as possible. I don’t enjoy physical fear or financial fear in any way whatsoever. I find it a very disagreeable experience.
James Goldsmith
There’s one thing that a gambler learns is that luck goes in streaks. All of a sudden a light goes on everything goes well and then suddenly it goes off like an electricity switch and you can’t get a thing right and you stumble around in the dark. Gamblers know when they’re on a roll as they call it – they’re lucky. And a good gambler presses his luck. And when it turns he fears it and goes home. The best gamblers are the ones who know how to press their luck and cut out and go home when they’re unlucky. Human nature is the opposite. Human nature when the fellow’s up a bit, his wife wants to go home.
James Goldsmith
[On good managers.] There’s nothing more destructive, more dangerous than a really good, efficient, hard-working, dedicated, effective man going in the wrong direction. Because he will destroy you will incredible speed. So if the man is going in the wrong direction, in other words pursuing the wrong strategy, what you want is an idle, slothful, wasteful and does nothing and is totally ineffective man because he won’t go too far and damage too much. That’s why inactive governments are often the best.
James Goldsmith
Management is a pyramid. In terms of responsibility it’s an inverse pyramid. The person on the factory line – packaging a product - is interested in packaging that product.
James Goldsmith
People don’t ask themselves very fundamental and obvious questions.
James Goldsmith
[On his rules for dealing with bankers.] It depends whether you’re poor or rich at the time. Try and avoid begging.
James Goldsmith
Bankers on the whole are the most abysmal businessmen in the world. There has been no industry which has lost money more consistently than the bankers. One of the great jokes of all time is the idea that the big banks should control industry when they basically run their own companies into trouble over the years as we have seen because they like to package big loans. They lend money - $10 billion to Brazil in one loan as they did over the years and they… or 20 billion to this or 30 billion to that… Western bankers have lost in fact hundreds of billions of pounds on the lesser developing countries that had no chance of repaying it. On all sorts of loans that were fashionable…
James Goldsmith
On the whole bankers are no longer bankers, they are bureaucrats working in banking.
James Goldsmith
If you can see a bankwagon, it’s too late to get on it. It’s structural…
James Goldsmith
If you speak to ten investment managers, ten institutional managers and nine or ten are optimistic, then it means they’re all invested because it means they believe the markets going to go up… So there’s no further room to go, there’s no tie or impetus to push it up further. Whereas if you telephone ten investment managers and find unanimity that the market is going to hell and it’s disastrous what happens then? You know they’ve pulled out of the market, they’ve got cash. For the slightest turn you’ve got a huge flood of money damned up ready to go. A dam busts and it’s ready to go as it was in 1982. There’s a structural reason if you can find quasi unanimity in the stock market, you can do the opposite and be almost certain of success. It’s structural.
James Goldsmith
Even success is a phase. Nobody’s going to succeed forever. For the very simple reason that success has the seeds of destruction by the very fact that people get satisfied, that people get old, that people no longer have the ambition. That their judgement therefore is a lack of ambition… So automatically there’s cycles it individuals and families and companies and communities and relations. It’s part of life.
James Goldsmith
There’s a huge conflict of interest between shareholders and managers. A shareholder wants value, a business to grow in value… In other words he invests for profit. A manager if he has no shares, quite often managers not for profit, but manages to create an empire to create managers for size rather than value. Why? Because if he can create a vast empire he gets the trappings of an emperor. He gets private planes and cars and assistants and secretaries… He can give this to that university. He gets his knighthood and is a man of great importance. And therefore as far as he is concerned, size is more important than value. As far as owners are concerned, shareholders, value is more important than size. Now shareholders, if they’re intelligent will motivate management by making them shareholders so as to align interest.
James Goldsmith
The Chinese have an old saying. It say’s ‘Those that the gods hate – they satisfy their ambitions.’ Which means that you have to keep finding new ambitions. There can be nothing worse than a person who’s ambitions have been satisfied.
James Goldsmith
Why would it be less economically viable to invest in improving the environment rather than injuring it?
James Goldsmith
[In 1976.] Unnatural practices are creating products that differ more and more from their natural counterparts.
James Goldsmith
[In May 1997.] I don’t believe in material rationalism as the be-all and end-all.
James Goldsmith
[In 1957 when he was literally hours from bankruptcy, he was saved by a six-week bank strike which enabled him to find a buyer for his ailing company.] It was the most astounding and unexpected bit of luck I have ever had in my whole career.
James Goldsmith
Bureaucracy is a disease. It centralizes and draws away vigor. Whenever my businesses became so big to have a bureaucracy, I broke up the business. It was systematically organized in an entrepreneurial rather than bureaucratic way.
James Goldsmith
[On not having said the quote ‘When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy.’] I regret not having said it myself. It is quite funny. What can I do except laugh about it?
James Goldsmith
[On his philosophy of child rearing.] I don’t think parents ought to choose, but to give as good advice as possible. To be like a sturdy tree to offer shade… to be a place they can come back to.
James Goldsmith
I am bi-national, and I do travel the world, but I am totally a creature of habit.
James Goldsmith
I am totally autodidact. [Self-taught – constantly a reader.]
James Goldsmith
I am not going to pretend I am not what I am.
James Goldsmith
I had made enough money to do what I wanted to do, to travel at leisure, to write books and build a house.
James Goldsmith
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