Thomas J. Watson Quotes (86 Quotes)

We must never feel satisfied.

Watson himself said that when he was able to develop loyalty in men, ability followed. 'Joining a company is an act that calls for absolute loyalty in big matters and little ones,' he declared. Criticism, if necessary at all, was permitted only to superiors.

It was necessary for us to discover greater powers of destruction than our enemies. We did. But after every war we have followed through with a new rise in our standard of living by the application of war-taught knowledge for the benefit of the world. It will be the same with the atomic bomb principles.

The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.

Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous - not just to some people in some circumstances - but to everyone all the time.

DEAR Tom A thought that has occurred and reoccurred to me during my vacation is that some capable writer should do a biography of your life. This thought came to me because of my constant concern, publicly and privately, in the combating of the trend tow.

So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because that's where you will find success. On the far side of failure.

The way to succeed is to double your error rate.

Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.

The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer.

It cant be done, engineers might tell him. It has to be done, Watson would order, and often it could be. With this approach Watson brought out the best in his menin his engineers, for example. He believed that engineering, like salesmanship, depended not only on laws but on will. For him the first principle of science, as well as the first principle of the world of men, was enthusiasm. Build it, he would order his engineers arbitrarily. And when they did, the machine often seemed to be a triumph of Dale Carnegie over Newton.

Watson's motto at the first CTR conventions Your company is your friend. That is my hope and aim and ambition.

Life itself is a matter of salesmanship.

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.

He would say over and over again that the company was not merely a business, but 'an institution that will go on forever.'

When I speak about the future development of our business, I want to include every other business in the United States. In my judgment, every legitimate business in our country today has a far better future ahead of it than it has ever had before.

We progress because we are willing to change.

The greatest asset of a man, a business or a nation is faith. The men who built this country and those who made it prosper during its darkest days were men whose faith in its future was unshakable. Men of courage, they dared to go forward despite all hazards men of vision, they always looked forward, never backward. Christianity, the greatest institution humanity has ever known, was founded by twelve men, limited in education, limited in resources, but with an abundance of faith and divine leadership. The vision essential to clear thinking the common sense needed for wise decisions the courage of convictions based on facts not fancies and the constructive spirit of faith as opposed to the destructive forces of doubt will preserve our Christian ways of life.

If joining IBM was commitment, not employment, and the company engaged in something more than business, it had a right to demand of its men unconditional loyalty, Watson believed.

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.

Within us all there are wells of thought and dynamos of energy which are not suspected until emergencies arise. Then oftentimes we find that it is comparatively simple to double or treble our former capacities and to amaze ourselves by the results achieved. Quotas, when set up for us by others, are challenges which goad us on to surpass ourselves. The outstanding leaders of every age are those who set up their own quotas and constantly exceed them.

There is very little difference between the general manager, the sales manager, the factory manager, the office manager, the factory man, the office man and the salesman. We have different ideas and different work, but when you come down to it, there is j.

THINK. Think about your appearance, associations, actions, ambitions, accomplishment.

To the salesmen, Watson preached individuality and conservatism at the same time Some men think that personality can be acquired by wearing unusual clothes or by saying something unusual. That is where many young men are wrong. Present your proposition in your own natural way, always keeping your personality behind your product.

A manager is an assistant to his men.

If we do not take advantage of our opportunities, it is our own fault.

Success is an individual proposition.

Point out to the men working with you and around you that we forgive thoughtful mistakes that it is only the thoughtless mistakes that cause trouble. Tell them first to be sure they have thought about each proposition, then to go ahead.

What synchronism means to a clock, a convention means to our organization it enables those of us who are behind to catch up and get in step with the others.

It is better to aim at perfection and miss, than to aim at imperfection and hit it.

Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.

We must all take time to do enough thinking to formulate our own conclusions.

The time who utilizes every minute of every hour becomes a bigger, better being every minute.

It is my personal opinion that we are going to recover from this depression and establish on a sounder and better basis, and we are going to reach greater heights of prosperity than ever before in this country. Now, that is just my personal opinion, but it is based on history, because that is what has happened following every depression. As we read the history of the various depressions we find that the people all felt about them just as we do about this one. One of the reasons we go ahead rapidly after coming out of a depression is that inventive genius and business talents have been put to a test, and they have always devised new and better ways to do things.

We are willing to spend any reasonable amount of money on education in our organization, because we have a group of men and women in our business who are constantly seeking knowledge, knowing that is the way to make themselves more valuable to the company and, automatically, more valuable to themselves. We are working out a plan that is going to take in everybody in the organization. We are going to have post graduate schools for our men in the field, and post graduate schools for our executivesand many of them.

We must all consider ourselves as assistants, regardless of the titles we carry in our official capacities.

You don't hear things that are bad about your company unless you ask. It is easy to hear good tidings, but you have to scratch to get the bad news.

If a man goes to work in the right spirit, work is no hardship.

Good design is good business.

You work the first eight hours of each day for survival. Anything after that is an investment.

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.

A message from Paris to demonstrate the International Radiotype at the National Business Show in NYC, October 16, 1933 We shall find ourselves in a better world than mankind has ever known.

Less than three weeks before his death, in one of Watsons last public statements about his company, he observed It's this family spiritcombined with vision and faiththat has been responsible, perhaps more than anything else, for IBM's success.

Time is your chief stock in trade.

Every time we've moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

This kind of intense loyalty, then, became the well-spring of the IBM spirit, the family spirit as it was called.

Encouragement is a necessary part of supervision.