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Quote by Charles Koch

“Hubris, arrogance, is just one step ahead of loss of integrity, because if you think you're better than other people, you know more, then you're going to think, as many leaders have, that the rules don't apply to them - so they lose their integrity.”

Quote by Charles Koch

Author

Charles Koch
Charles Koch

Charles Koch is an American businessman, born on November 1, 1935. He is the founder and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private companies in the United States. Koch Industries operates in various industries, including oil, chemicals, and forest products, and is one of the largest private companies in the world. Koch has achieved great success in the business world, but is also a controversial political donor. more

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“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?"”

“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.”

“Most companies want free enterprise in general because that produces better goods and services and makes people's lives better, but they don't want it in their business. They want protection from competition, they want subsidies, they want the government to pick winners and losers, and they want to be picked as winners, and that's what we're opposing, and that's what drives my whole efforts in policy, and in the political arena.”

“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.”