Charles Koch Quotes
101 Charles Koch Quotes
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Developing a personal knowledge involves a personal transformation. It requires learning a new framework and mental models, and then using them to work out concrete problems. Personal knowledge is the result of integrating theory and practice.
Charles Koch
To build a culture of discovery, we must encourage, not discourage, the passionate pursuit of our own and others’ hunches.
Charles Koch
An organization must not only avoid unproductive tendencies, but continually strive to improve its ability to internalize and apply proper mental models. This requires the most difficult and painful of all changes: A change in the way we think.
Charles Koch
To guide activity correctly, we must measure what leads to results, not simply what is easy to measure.
Charles Koch
If an evaluation of an employee’s performance only includes his or her contribution to current profits but not the effect on long-term profits and culture, we inadvertently encourage employees to work on the wrong things.
Charles Koch
Striving to comply with every law does not mean agreeing with every law.
Charles Koch
In today’s world it is not sufficient to satisfy customers. A company’s reputation is critical to how it will be treated by others and to its long-term success.
Charles Koch
We must build a positive reputation based on reality, or others will create one for us based on speculation or animus and we won’t like what they create.
Charles Koch
A positive reputation is built by behaving consistently with sound principles, creating real value, achieving compliance excellence and living up to commitments.
Charles Koch
Measure profitability wherever practical.
Charles Koch
Constantly innovate and learn through experimental discovery.
Charles Koch
Businesses that destroy value are detrimental to our lives. When businesses make unprofitable products, they are drawing resources away from higher-valued used, and when businesses waste resources, they prevent them from being beneficially used at all. In either case, a business with unattractive returns should be restructured, sold to a better owner or shut down.
Charles Koch
Koch companies turn crude oil into products such as gasoline, and chemicals into fibers used in carpets and clothes. If we can make these products using fewer or less costly raw materials, the resources saved are available to satisfy other needs, enabling our profits to increase even when our prices decline.
Charles Koch
It is not a question of whether there should be self-interest; it is a question of how to channel that self-interest.
Charles Koch
The need for talent in obvious.
Charles Koch
To be a truly successful organization, one that excels and stands the test of time, virtue as well as talent must be emphasized.
Charles Koch
Stop, think and ask.
Charles Koch
Employee performance will change over time. Some employees greatly improve their performance, while the performance of others may deteriorate because of their inability to adapt to a changing environment...
Charles Koch
For a business to create value in society, its employees must create value for the business. Any employee who is not contributing to value creation is undermining their business’s ability to do so.
Charles Koch
Sixty-some years of experience with dozens of different partners have taught us the importance of partnering with those who share our vision and values. If we find a partner no longer shares our vision or values, we strive to dissolve the partnership… If partners have conflicting and irreconcilable visions, the business will not realize its potential and will probably fail.
Charles Koch
Just as entrepreneurs are not free from the discipline of the market, scientists are not free from the standards and norms of the scientific community.
Charles Koch
None of us has all the knowledge to consistently make the best decisions or discoveries.
Charles Koch
If you find that your views are rarely challenged, or that you rarely challenge the views of others, something is wrong. It may be the lack of entrepreneurial drive, the culture, or perhaps the incentives.
Charles Koch
Decisions should be made by those with the best knowledge, taking comparative advantage into account.
Charles Koch
I want my fair share – and that’s all of it.
Charles Koch
I believe, for most businesses – constant rethinking and improvement are now more important than ever.
Charles Koch
My father considered work ethic, attitude toward work as critically important to developing yourself and in fact being healthy and happy through your life. And he believed that unless you started working at an early age, you never really develop the skills and habits and values necessary to make you productive.
Charles Koch
When we think of someone really having a job we think of somebody who is creating profit for the company by creating value in society.
Charles Koch
I had two younger brothers. And years later… my father didn't require them to do the same level of work that I did, so I asked him, I said, 'Papa, why weren't you as tough on my brothers as you were on me?' and he said, 'Son, you plum wore me out.’
Charles Koch
[On his father’s belief of the importance of punctuality.] When I was in graduate school in Boston he had asked me to meet with him there to sit in on a meeting… he was having a business meeting. And I had an awful time finding a place to park. So I arrived five minutes late. He was standing on the steps of the building waiting for me and smoke was coming out of his ears. I was never late again, wth him and I'm rarely ever late on anything… He taught me some great lessons
Charles Koch
You get a reputation for integrity not by one act of integrity but by acting with integrity over a long period of time particularly at those times when the other person is vulnerable and you're in a position to take advantage of them and you don't do it.
Charles Koch
You really only build trust by behaving with integrity through all different situations over a long period of time.
Charles Koch
I encountered the writings of people like von Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and so on. And they convinced me that societal well-being was only possible in a system of economic freedom.
Charles Koch
We use 90% of the profit for investing.
Charles Koch
Public companies get tremendous pressure every quarter to achieve short-term goals to satisfy the stock analysts… These companies must give up long-term performance for short-term benefit.
Charles Koch
An effective business vision starts with the creation of value and ends with creation of value.
Charles Koch
Competitors are improving, people’s values are changing, technology is changing, you’ve got to be out on the front edge if you… want to survive and succeed long term.
Charles Koch
When you don’t have to think about the parts, you can focus on your objective. And the parts are so second nature to you that you don’t think of it.
Charles Koch
Every leader needs to be a role model…
Charles Koch
I have a lot of ideas. Most of them are terrible. But what saved me – well, to the extent I’ve been saved – is that… I want to get people with the best knowledge and insights in each one of those key aspects and get a challenge from them.
Charles Koch
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