Lee Iacocca
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
Lee Iacocca
You’ve got to say, I think that if I keep working at this and want it badly enough I can have it. It’s called perseverance.
Lee Iacocca
Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don’t just stand there, make it happen.
Lee Iacocca
We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
Lee Iacocca
The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
Lee Iacocca
In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
Lee Iacocca
Management is nothing more than motivating other people.
Lee Iacocca
So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don’t sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we’ve satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late.
Lee Iacocca
The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything.
Lee Iacocca
The one word that makes a good manager- decisiveness.
Lee Iacocca
The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family.
Lee Iacocca
MBAs know everything but understand nothing.
Lee Iacocca
The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they’re expected to do — they always reach.
Lee Iacocca
Any supervisor worth his salt would rather deal with people who attempt too much than with those who try too little.
Lee Iacocca
No matter what you have doen for yourself or for humanity, if you can´t look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?
Lee Iacocca
The trick is to make sure you don’t die waiting for prosperity to come.
Lee Iacocca
When the product is right, you don’t have to be a great marketer.
Lee Iacocca
My father always used to say that when you die, if you’ve got five real friends, then you’ve had a great life.
Lee Iacocca
Boys, there ain’t no free lunches in this country. And don’t go spending your whole life commiserating that you got the raw deals. You’ve got to say, I think that if I keep working at this and want it bad enough I can have it. It’s called perseverance.
Lee Iacocca
I have to act to live.
Lee Iacocca
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.
Lee Iacocca
We at Chrysler borrow money the old fashion way. We pay it back.
Lee Iacocca
People say to me, You were a roaring success. How did you do it? I go back to what my parents taught me. Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don’t just stand there, make something happen.
Lee Iacocca
People want economy and they’ll pay almost any price to get it.
Lee Iacocca
If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.
Lee Iacocca
One of the things the government can’t do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt.
Lee Iacocca
I’ve always found that the speed of the boss is the speed of the team.
Lee Iacocca
I have found that being honest is the best technique I can use. Right up front, tell people what you’re trying to accomplish and what you’re willing to sacrifice to accomplish it.
Lee Iacocca
He was eccentric. He was no prince in his social attitudes and his politics. But Henry Ford’s mark in history is almost unbelievable.
Lee Iacocca
Every little kid wants to grow up to be a cowboy, and I did.
Lee Iacocca
Why is our free-enterprise system so strong?- Not because it stands still, frozen in the past, but because it has always adapted to changing realities.
Lee Iacocca
Every business and every product has risks. You can’t get around it.
Lee Iacocca
Talk to people in their own language. If you do it well, they’ll say, “God, he said exactly what I was thinking.” And when they begin to respect you, they’ll follow you to the death.
Lee Iacocca
When future historians look back on our way of curing inflation they’ll probably compare it to bloodletting in the Middle Ages.
Lee Iacocca
It’s a good thing god doesn’t let you look a year or two into the future, or you might be sorely tempted to shoot yourself.
Lee Iacocca
If it hadn’t been for Henry Ford’s drive to create a mass market for cars, America wouldn’t have a middle class today.
Lee Iacocca
There are times when even the best manager is like the little boy with the big dog, waiting to see where the dog wants to go so he can take him there.
Lee Iacocca
Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo?
Lee Iacocca
The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better.
Lee Iacocca
There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.
Lee Iacocca
If a guy is over 25 percent jerk, he’s in trouble. And Henry was 95 percent.
Lee Iacocca
I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.
Lee Iacocca
I have always found that if I move with seventy-five percent or more of the facts that I usually never regret it. It’s the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.
Lee Iacocca
There ain’t no free lunches in this country. And don’t go spending your whole life commiserating that you got raw deals. You’ve got to say, ‘I think that if I keep working at this and want it bad enough I can have it.
Lee Iacocca
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
Lee Iacocca
The thing that lies at the foundation of positive change, the way I see it, is service to a fellow human being.
Lee Iacocca
Start with good people, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate them and reward them. If you do all those things effectively, you can’t miss.
Lee Iacocca
I forgot to shake hands and be friendly. It was an important lesson about leadership.
Lee Iacocca
Motivation is everything. You can do the work of two people, but you can’t be two people. Instead, you have to inspire the next guy down the line and get him to inspire his people.
Lee Iacocca
In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product and profits. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.
Lee Iacocca
The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.
Lee Iacocca
I’m sometimes described as a flamboyant leader and a hip-shooter, a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants operator. But if that were true, I could never have been successful in this business.
Lee Iacocca
If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I’d say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.
Lee Iacocca
Something’s got to happen in this town to turn it around, or we’re all going down the tubes.
Lee Iacocca
The biggest mistake in my life was hiring Eaton as chairman without checking him out first, … I didn’t know him and hired the wrong guy, an error of judgment. When you make a bad people choice it hurts a lot of people for a long time.
Lee Iacocca
I gotta tell ya, with our $2.4 billion in profits last year, they gave me a great big bonus. Really, it’s almost obscene.
Lee Iacocca
If you can find a better car, buy it.
Lee Iacocca
We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?
Lee Iacocca
I was stunned. It was a complete takeover. Chrysler had $12 billion in cash and was stronger at the time and should have bought Daimler.
Lee Iacocca
We believe the combination of these two companies will produce very powerful synergies and puts us on a solid platform from which we should be able to realize our full growth potential.
Lee Iacocca