Alfred Taubman Quotes

103 Alfred Taubman Quotes (Adolph Alfred Taubman, Taubman Centers)

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To succeed, you have to look beyond immediate barriers and see opportunities.
Alfred Taubman

Breaking down barriers is very rewarding.
Alfred Taubman

The better your idea, the more some people will want you to fail. Believe in yourself, and you’re on your way.
Alfred Taubman

The idea of retailing is to get people inside the store.
Alfred Taubman

Dressing store windows is an art.
Alfred Taubman

Every day, we encounter psychological, physical, cultural, social, and economic barriers. In order to accomplish anything, people have to find a way to get beyond the limitations…
Alfred Taubman

I never lost my sense of curiosity and the desire to learn.
Alfred Taubman

I learned that a lack of capital was no barrier to entry if you had a good idea.
Alfred Taubman

I learned that my strengths were far more important than my shortcomings…
Alfred Taubman

Entrepreneurs often see staying put as a more risky proposition than moving on.
Alfred Taubman



Entrepreneurs… seem to understand that being different makes it necessary to create their own paths. That’s a powerful motivation.
Alfred Taubman

I wanted to create places where customers would want to shop and retailers would want to do business – more business than they had ever done before.
Alfred Taubman

I realized that while I enjoyed architecture and drawing. I really wanted to build.
Alfred Taubman

It came naturally to me to look at things differently. But it’s something you have to work on and became accustomed to doing.
Alfred Taubman

It just makes sense that if the fate of my family name and fortune are directly linked with the business I’m running, my effort and commitment – in most cases – will exceed those of a ‘hired hand.’ Call it passion. Call it love. Call it survival. Family employees and leaders just have more skin in the game.
Alfred Taubman

No one goes to buy candy necessarily, they buy those things because it's there, because they can smell it, they can touch it.
Alfred Taubman

Developing a regional shopping center requires the talents of many people.
Alfred Taubman

‘This better work kid.’ It’s your ass if it doesn’t. Strong words. Especially when you consider they were directed at a twenty-four-year old store planner by Milton J Petrie, founder and chairman of the Petrie Stores Corporation. It was 1948, and I had just presented Petrie with an alternative plan for an apparel store he intended to build in Highland Park, Michigan, a close-in suburb of Detroit.
Alfred Taubman

What did a junior draftsman half his age at the Charles N. Agree architecture firm know that he didn’t?
Alfred Taubman

I may not have owned any stores at the time, but I had been selling things – shoes, clothes, flowers – to people since I was a kid. I had studied design in college and had some experience in the field.
Alfred Taubman



Where [Milton] Petrie saw a tried-and-tested recipe for retailing success, I saw an inefficient use of space; were Petrie’s experienced store designers saw opportunity, I saw unnecessary barriers.
Alfred Taubman

Most important of all, in my design, far less stood between the customer and the goods, the customer and the salespeople, the customer and a sale!
Alfred Taubman

Threshold resistance… The physical and psychological barriers that stand between your shoppers and your merchandise. It’s the force that keeps your customer from opening your door and coming in over the threshold. I think we can reduce all that with this new design.
Alfred Taubman

That’s when those glorious words came out of his mouth. ‘This better work, kid. It’s your ass if it doesn’t.’… From that initial meeting, Milton Petrie and I developed a close friendship, which continued to the day he died, in 1994, at the age of ninety-two.
Alfred Taubman

[From 1948] The Taubman Company… over more than half a century, we have pioneered the development of shopping centers, transformed the nature and experience of luxury retailing, and created tens of thousands of jobs. Today, Taubman Centers owns and/or manages twenty-three large centers in the United States.
Alfred Taubman

Developing unique retail environments certainly made me wealthy – wealthier than I could have ever imagined.
Alfred Taubman

When you get to be my age, there’s only so much golfing, fishing and shooting you can do.
Alfred Taubman

Every day, we encounter psychological, physical, cultural, social, and economic barriers. In order to accomplish anything, people have to find a way to get beyond the limitations they believe that personal background, conventional wisdom, common practice, or experience has placed on their imaginations…
Alfred Taubman

Successful entrepreneurs and builders possess a sort of serial vision that allows them to look past things as they are to see how they could be better, not just different – and hence more valuable. It means looking at a wheat field in a rural area and seeing a massive shopping center…
Alfred Taubman

I was born in 1924, five years before the start of the Great Depression, in Pontiac, Michigan, to German Jewish immigrants Fannie and Philip Taubman.
Alfred Taubman



School was not easy for me, either… Back then, dyslexia, which I have struggled with all my life, was diagnosed as slowness or stupidity.
Alfred Taubman

Where others saw challenges, my teachers saw potential. I think that’s why I so respect the teaching profession and have made education a major focus of my philanthropy.
Alfred Taubman

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor… I couldn’t wait to enlist… It was around this time that I stopped used my first name, Adolph.
Alfred Taubman

I learned the value of service and convenience, as well as presentation and delivery to pull the customer toward a new opportunity.
Alfred Taubman

Even the most difficult personal and business challenges – whether physical or psychological – could be overcome if understood and confronted forcefully.
Alfred Taubman

[As a young man] I was impatient. I was eager to get out and take advantage of what I saw as a world of opportunity.
Alfred Taubman

I think men and women who go it alone in business are different. Because of that, they’re also very insecure, which is not always a bad thing.
Alfred Taubman

Many entrepreneurs don’t grow up comfortably fitting in. I certainly didn’t.
Alfred Taubman

Growing up different has convinced them that the only person they can really count on to make it all happen is the person they look at in the mirror every morning.
Alfred Taubman

In 1950, at age twenty-six, I turned to the guy in the mirror, and with a $5,000 loan from Manufacturers National Bank of Detroit (now part of Comerica), started paving my own path.
Alfred Taubman



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