🧭From Start to Scale: 100 Business Rules

“The question is not ‘Can this product be built?’ Instead, it is ‘Should this product be built?’”

— Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

“You’re not allowed to tell them what their problem is. They have to tell you.”

— Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test

“The greatest mistake in business is assuming you already understand the customer. Real understanding comes not from data, but from dialogue.”

— Robert Woodruff, Know Your Customer

“The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most.”

— Adam Grant, Originals

“The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.”

– W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy

“We have to be able to do something slowly before we can have any hope of doing it correctly with speed.”

— Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning

“Numbers don’t lie. But people who don’t understand numbers do.”

— Karen Berman, Financial Intelligence

“Profit is a theory. Cash is a fact.”

– Greg Crabtree, Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits

“Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.”

— Gary Keller, The One Thing

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”

— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measure of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?”

— Greg McKeown, Essentialism

“The problem is not that people fail to work hard enough. The problem is that they work hard at the wrong things.”

— Michael Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited

“Too many rules stifle innovation. Too few lead to chaos. Simple rules hit the sweet spot.”

— Donald Sull & Kathleen Eisenhardt, Simple Rules

“Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps…”

—Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto

“Don’t move information to authority. Move authority to the information.”

— L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around

“Nothing will accelerate your success more than getting the right team in place. And nothing will derail it faster than keeping the wrong people too long.”

— Geoff Smart, Who

“The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.”

— Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership

“Don’t try to scale a business that hasn’t nailed the basics. Otherwise, you’ll just get bigger problems.”

— Verne Harnish, Scaling Up

“A brand is a promise to the customer to deliver a specific set of features, benefits, and services consistently.”

— David Aaker, Building Strong Brands

“Trust is equal parts character and competence… You can look at any leadership failure, and it’s always a failure of one or the other.” 

— Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

— Simon Sinek, Start With Why

“The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.”

— Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick

“The more your revenue depends on you showing up to work every day, the less valuable your business is.”

— John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer

“Good is the enemy of great.”

— Jim Collins, Good to Great

“Your business is supposed to serve you. If it’s not profitable, it’s broken.”

– Mike Michalowicz, Profit First

“Infinite-minded leaders understand that ‘best’ is not a permanent state. Instead, they strive to be better.”

— Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game

“It’s not how much money you make. It’s how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.”

– Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad’s Guide To Investing

“Strategy…It requires making explicit choices—to do some things and not others—and building a business around those choices.”

— A.G. Lafley & Roger L. Martin, Playing to Win

“The more your business relies on you personally, the less valuable it is.”

— John Warrillow, Built to Sell

“Enduring great companies preserve their core values and purpose while their business strategies and operating practices endlessly adapt to a changing world.”

— Jim Collins, Built to Last

“Companies don’t fail because they grow. They fail because they forget who they were before they grew.”

— Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

“Becoming is better than being.”

— Carol S. Dweck, Mindset

“The ability to ask beautiful questions — profound, ambitious questions that can shift the way we perceive or think about something — is one of the most powerful forces for change.”

– Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question

“You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft, that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.”

— David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me

“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”

— Cal Newport, Deep Work

“Success in any field, but especially in business, is about working with people, not against them.”

— Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone

“Receiving feedback sits at the intersection of two needs: our drive to learn and our longing to be accepted. That’s why it’s so hard—and so important.”

— Douglas Stone, Thanks for the Feedback

“…your greatest asset is how others see you. Not just what you say you are, but what you prove you are—over and over again.”

— Michael Fertik, The Reputation Economy

“One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all.”

— Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog!

“The higher you go in the organization, the more your problems are behavioral. The problems that got you to your current level of success are rarely the ones that will get you to the next level.”

– Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

“If you don’t end what needs to be ended, nothing new and better can begin.”

— Dr. Henry Cloud, Necessary Endings

“The ingenuity of people is far more reliable than the ingenuity of systems. Trust in people is not naïve—it’s essential.”

— Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise

“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.”

— Seth Godin, Purple Cow

“Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.”

— Bob Burg, The Go-Giver

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry… but you won’t—unless the leader confronts the dysfunction.”

— Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

“There are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets.”

— Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things