This is the third and final installment of former Coca-Cola Company CEO Donald Keough’s classic book The Ten Commandments For Business Failure. Whether you serve in leadership in a church, business, non-profit, athletic environment, or some other discipline, these principles are critical to know but easy to apply.
If you missed the first two parts, I can’t encourage you enough to click here and here so get the first 52 quotes. Also, you can click the image above to purchase this valuable resource.
- ‘”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 the world.”
- “We are thrill seekers obsessed with safety.”
- “The ultimate resource is people – especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty – who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit and inevitably benefit the rest of us as well.”
- “To aspire to any kind of leadership in business you simply have to be an optimist.”
- “It was not a good time for America. Therefore, it was the perfect time for Coca-Cola to be optimistic.”
- “He (Neville Isdell) had this contagious kind of enthusiasm that defies quantifying, but you know it when you see it. It’s leadership.”
- “He (Isdell) connected with his people and basically convinced them that they were better than the competition. He also gave them a bright picture of the future.”
- “Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hagel
- “To have success you have to have a high level of unadulterated desire to get up and go to work.”
- “Work, real work, is often very hard, exhausting at times. 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. They deserve, for their own self-satisfaction, to perform at a high level. The hard work itself is what takes you tap-dancing into the office. It’s the passion to solve the problems of the day.”
- “If you really want to fail, lose that passion for whatever it is you’re doing.”
- “I have never met a succesful person who did not express love for what he did and care about it passionately.”
- “To succeed in our various performances we have to strive to make an emotional connection with the audience.”
- “There is no such thing as a boring subject. What’s boring is your refusal to try to find what makes it interesting.”
- “A brand is magic and it will thrive when it is in the hands of those who understand its magic and treat it with passionate care.”
- “Dreams do not come true by wishing.”
- “As you go through your working life, in every job you do, decide that this is the last job you will ever have and, therefore, whatever the assignment determine you want to leave it better than you found it.”
- “The easiest way to develop an inner passion in a business setting is to focus all your mind and heart on four aspects of your world: your customers, your brands, your people, and, finally, your dreams.”
- “Don’t be afraid of the criticism that great enthusiasm and optimism sometimes engender among the cynical.”
- “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.” – Saint Augustine
And in conclusion, the following are Keough’s 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 Time to Think
- Put All Your Faith in Experts and Outside Consultants (The key word here is “All”. Consultants are still very valuable.)
- Love Your Bureaucracy
- Send Mixed Messages
- Be Afraid of the Future
- *Bonus – Lose Your Passion for Work – for Life
As a leader, what one principle from Keough’s teachings can you implement at your church, home, school, or place of business today?
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