Who Said It: Founders and Business Leaders
Business quotation has a problem the other categories do not: a large share of the most famous lines were written by employees, agencies and ghostwriters, and then credited to the person standing at the front.
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The Apple line that Steve Jobs did not write
“People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do” is the closing line of Apple's Think Different campaign, and it is one of the most widely shared Steve Jobs quotations in existence. Jobs did not write it. The copy came out of the agency TBWA/Chiat/Day in 1997, and Rob Siltanen, who was creative director on the account, has given a detailed public account of how the text was produced and who contributed what. Our data credits Siltanen.
This is not a technicality. It is the defining feature of the category. Corporate quotation is a collaborative product in a way that a novel or a speech in parliament is not, and the credit routinely flows to the most famous name attached to the company rather than to the person who typed the sentence. Once you notice the pattern you start seeing it everywhere: mission statements credited to founders, ad copy credited to CEOs, and internal mottos credited to whoever was on the magazine cover that year.
One we deliberately left out. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” is the single most quoted line in business, and there is no evidence Henry Ford ever said it. It does not appear in his books, his interviews or his company’s archives, and researchers have looked hard. It is not in this deck, and it will not be. Our sourcing policy is that a quotation nobody can trace does not get presented as though somebody said it, however good it is.
The documented ones
| Quotation | Who | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life | Steve Jobs | Stanford commencement address, 2005 |
| We always overestimate the change in the next two years | Bill Gates | The Road Ahead, 1995 |
| Done is better than perfect | Sheryl Sandberg | Lean In, 2013 |
| If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, just get on | Sheryl Sandberg | Lean In, 2013 |
| Move fast and break things | Mark Zuckerberg | Facebook internal motto |
| Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning | Bill Gates | Business @ the Speed of Thought |
The Jobs Stanford address in 2005 is the highest quality source in the category: a single speech, filmed, transcribed and published by the university, which produced two of the entries in this deck. When a business quotation has that kind of provenance it is usually because the person was standing at a lectern rather than sitting in a meeting.
Move fast and break things, and what happened next
Facebook's internal motto is the most historically specific line in the set, and worth knowing the sequel to. The company retired it in 2014 in favour of “move fast with stable infrastructure,” which is far less quotable and considerably more honest about what running a large system involves. The original phrase has since become shorthand for an entire era of technology industry attitude, usually critically. Almost nobody who quotes it now is endorsing it.
The self-help drift
Read this set in one sitting and the resemblance to a motivational calendar is hard to miss. That is a real property of the genre rather than a flaw in the selection. Business quotation lives in keynote speeches, airport paperbacks and LinkedIn posts, three formats that select hard for portability over precision, and it drifts steadily towards the general and the encouraging. The Henry Ford entries here are a good example: attitude, destiny, headwinds. They are perfectly good sentiments, and they are also almost interchangeable with what a dozen other industrialists were saying at the time, which is exactly why unowned versions of them keep attaching themselves to whichever name is largest.
The set also includes Walt Disney, John D. Rockefeller, Oprah Winfrey, James Cameron, Robert Kiyosaki, Mohnish Pabrai and Farrah Gray, which keeps the distractors from collapsing into a straight Jobs versus Gates guess.
Frequently asked questions
Did Steve Jobs write the Think Different line?
No. The copy came from the agency TBWA/Chiat/Day in 1997. Rob Siltanen, the creative director on the account, has publicly described how the text was produced, and our data credits him.
Did Henry Ford say people would have asked for faster horses?
There is no evidence for it in his books, interviews or company archives. Because it cannot be traced, it is not in this deck at all rather than being included with a hedge.
Is move fast and break things still Facebook’s motto?
No. The company replaced it in 2014 with “move fast with stable infrastructure”. The original survives mainly as shorthand for a period of technology industry attitude.
How many questions does one round use?
Ten, drawn at random from the 26 in this set, reshuffled every time you play it again.
More Who Said It sets
- Scientists and inventors31 quotes from Einstein, Edison, Curie, Hawking and the Apollo 13 transmission everyone misquotes.
- Writers and poets52 lines from Wilde, Twain, Angelou, Orwell and Woolf, and the two authors everything gets credited to.
- Leaders and activists56 lines from Churchill, King, Mandela and Roosevelt, and the Voltaire quote Voltaire never wrote.
- Philosophers and proverbs21 lines from Aristotle to Nietzsche, plus the proverbs with no author at all.
- Athletes and coaches23 lines from Ali, Jordan, Kobe, Gretzky and Lombardi, and who really wrote the butterfly line.
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