Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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David Ogilvy: Conspiracy of the mediocre majority
‘Nowadays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on “teamwork” is bunkum – a conspiracy of the mediocre majority.’ —David Ogilvy.
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Nigel Calder: Science does correct itself
“Science does correct itself and that’s the reason why science is such a glorious thing for our species.” —Nigel Calder.
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Seth Klarman: Cash
“Some argue that holding significant cash is gambling, that being less than fully invested is akin to market timing. But isn’t a yes or no decision the crucial one in investing? Where does it say that investing means always buying something, even the best of a bad lot? An investor who can’t or won’t say…
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David Ogilvy: Buying your product
“You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.” —David Ogilvy.
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Rex Stout: Labels
“Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.” —Rex Stout.
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Charlie Munger: Durable competitive advantage
“What really makes it work is…durable competitive advantage…. You really want an advantage that, nourished without overwhelming skill, will keeping working for you for a long, long time. You want to avoid a business which is just so brutally competitive that nobody does well over the long pull.” —Charlie Munger.
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David Ogilvy: The consumer is your wife
“The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.” —David Ogilvy.
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Harriet Lerner: Change
“Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.” —Harriet Lerner.
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David Ogilvy: Don’t tell them to mine
“Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.” —David Ogilvy.
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Wendell Philips: Infidel, traitor
‘Write on my gravestone: “Infidel, Traitor” — infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.’ —Wendell Phillips.
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Charlie Munger: To hell with them
“Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group…then to hell with them.” —Charlie Munger.
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Charlie Munger: Envy
“The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy. I have conquered envy in my own life. I don’t envy anybody. I don’t give a damn what someone else has. But other people are driven crazy by it.” —Charlie Munger.
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David Ogilvy: Test
“The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. Test your premise. Test your media. Test your headlines and your illustrations. Test the size of your advertisements. Test your frequency. Test your level of expenditure. Test your commercials. Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.” —David Ogilvy.
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David Ogilvy: Promises are always kept
“In the best establishments, promises are always kept, whatever it may cost in agony and overtime.” —David Ogilvy.
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Harivansh Rai Bachchan: That’s me
“A body of clay, a mind full of play, a moment’s life — that’s me.” —Harivansh Rai Bachchan.
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David Ogilvy: Were they dull?
“Shakespeare wrote his sonnets with a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote sonatas within an equally rigid discipline – exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?” —David Ogilvy.
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David Ogilvy: Desire to make money
“Many of the greatest creations of man have been inspired by the desire to make money. When George Frederick Handel was on his beam ends, he shut himself up for twenty-one days and emerged with the complete score of Messiah – and hit the jackpot. Few of the themes of Messiah were original; Handel dredged…
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David Ogilvy: Inescapable duty
“It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.” —David Ogilvy.
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David Ogilvy: See them in their offices
“Do not summon people to your office – it frightens them. Instead, go to see them in their offices. This makes you visible throughout the agency. A chairman who never wanders about his agency becomes a hermit, out of touch with his staff.” —David Ogilvy.
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Steven Brust: Never
“To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity.” —Steven Brust.
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David Ogilvy: Not phonies, zeros or bastards
“Our offices must always be headed by the kind of men who command respect. Not phonies, zeros or bastards.” —David Ogilvy.
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George Eliot: Loneliness
“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” —George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans).
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David Ogilvy: Stampeded into change
‘It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to “come up with something new” every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image, and the stability to stick with…
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David Ogilvy: No capon ever rules the roost
“Most manufacturers are reluctant to accept any limitation on the image of their brand. They want it to be all things to all people. They want their brand to be a male brand and a female brand. An upper-class brand and a plebeian brand. They generally end up with a brand which has no personality…
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David Ogilvy: One simple promise
“It pays to boil down your strategy to one simple promise and go the whole hog in delivering that promise.” —David Ogilvy.
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Jeff Bezos: Encounter with reality
“Any business plan won’t survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.” —Jeff Bezos.
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John D Rockefeller: Favorite activities
“The person who can create value the most is the person who devotes himself completely to his favorite activities.” —John D. Rockefeller.
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Charlie Munger: Golden rule
“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.” —Charlie Munger.
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Chinua Achebe: Test of integrity
“It has always seemed to me that the test of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.” —Chinua Achebe.
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Charlie Munger: Hard and rare
“There aren’t many times in a lifetime when you know you’re right, and you know you have one that’s really going to work wonderfully. Maybe five, six times in a lifetime you get a chance to do it. And people that do it two or three times early all go broke because they think it’s…
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Johann Kaspar Lavater: Disagreeable truth
“He who, when called upon to speak a disagreeable truth, tells it boldly and has done, is both bolder and milder than he who nibbles in a low voice and never ceases nibbling.” —Johann Kaspar Lavater.
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Charlie Munger: Less nonsense
“There are huge advantages for an individual to get into a position where you make a few great investments and just sit back and wait: You’re paying less to brokers. You’re listening to less nonsense. And if it works, the governmental tax system gives you an extra 1, 2, or 3 percentage points per annum…
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Jawaharlal Nehru: Religion
“The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the…
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James F Byrnes: More afraid of life than death
“Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.” —James F. Byrnes.
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Robert Louis Stevenson: Banquet of consequences
“Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” —Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Warren Buffett: Fatal flaw
“Nature finds the fatal flaw, always—and so does economics.” —Warren Buffett.
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Auguste Rodin: Never anything ugly in nature
“To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.” —Auguste Rodin.
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Dorothy Parker: Find a foe
“The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core — Scratch a lover and find a foe!” —Dorothy Parker, Ballad of a Great Weariness.
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Donald Knuth: Computers
“Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.” —Donald Knuth.
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Howard Marks: Investment careers
“One of the most striking things I’ve noted over the last thirty-five years is how brief most outstanding investment careers are. Not as short as the careers of professional athletes, but shorter than they should be in a physically nondestructive vocation…. I don’t think many investment managers’ careers end because they fail to hit home…
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Johan Christoph Friedrich von Schiller: Blame diminishes as guilt increases
“It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases.” —Johan Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.
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David Ogilvy: If you tell lies
“If you tell lies about your product you will be found out – either by the government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time.” —David Ogilvy.
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Richard Saul Wurman: Risk of failure
“When I was a child, I once saw someone in a wheelchair. My mother told me that the person in the wheelchair had been in an accident and would recover, but would need to learn to walk again. That was a revelation to me because it seemed that once we’d learned to walk, we’d always…
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Carl Sagan: In science
‘In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change…
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Warren Buffett: Write your obituary
“Write your obituary and try to figure out how to live up to it.” —Warren Buffett.
