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Charles Koch

Charles Koch Quotes

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Famous Charles Koch Quotes

“I try to build on our management philosophy. I try to understand what the threats and opportunities are for us. Uh, I try to make sure that we're driving innovation and creative destruction hard enough so we're not blindsided, and that our attitude is to, in starting any initiative, any business, is to focus on how we can create value for others, rather than how we maximize profit, because you can make money focusing on, "How do I maximize profit?"”

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“So to the best we can, what we do is focus on creating value for others, and how do we do that? We do it by trying to produce products and services that our customers will value more than their alternatives, and not just their alternatives today, but what the alternatives will be in the future. We try to more efficiently use resources than our competitors, and constantly improve in that, and we try to do the best job we can in creating a safe environment, and environmental excellence, and constantly improve at that.”

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Author:Charles Koch
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“My philosophy, one of the biggest enemies of future success is past success, because you become complacent, you become risk averse, and that's one of the things we try to drive here, and this is fundamental to this philosophy, and that's in this component change, and also in value creation. That we need to drive creative destruction, not just incremental innovations, but innovations that will change the whole nature of the business.”

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“I learned that unless you start working, if you're frozen out of work, you will never learn the habits, the discipline, the values of cooperation and improvement unless you get a job, and that's what statistic show. It's, unless you get a job and keep it, you will not get out of poverty. If you do, you have a very good chance of working out of poverty.”

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“I've been blessed by learning certain principles and values that transformed my life and enabled me to accomplish more than I really had the ability to do or ever dream possible. And so I decided that I wanted to give as many other people as possible the opportunity to learn these ideas and transform their lives as I had.”

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“People are interested in certain ideas, in certain periods, and then that moves, and okay, now people are more interested in studying this, and there is no perfect balance, and how would you know what the perfect balance is? I mean, what does it mean to have too many Beethoven chairs and too few Stravinsky chairs? I mean, that's kind of a value judgment that isn't really based on humility. We don't know what the optimum number is, so let people figure this out on their own. People are more interested in Beethoven than Stravinsky? Great! Why would that bother me?”

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“Successful companies create value by providing products or services their customers value more highly than available alternatives. They do this while consuming fewer resources, leaving more resources available to satisfy other needs in society. Value creation involves making people's lives better. It is contributing to prosperity in society.”

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Book:The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company
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“In general, an asset should be sold when it has greater value to a buyer. This happens when a buyer has a complimentary business or capability that would enable them to do more with that business. Many businesses we have exited were not failures, but had simply reached a point in their life cycle where they no longer provided a core capability or served as a platform for growth.”

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“Being captive to quarterly earnings isn't consistent with long-term value creation. This pressure and the short term focus of equity markets make it difficult for a public company to invest for long-term success, and tend to force company leaders to sacrifice long-term results to protect current earnings.”

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