Jerry Pournelle Quotes

Can we please agree that in the real world, corporations exist for one purpose and one purpose only - to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?

You can't run a €10 million business the way you run a €1 million business.

I'm always a fan of good business moves.

The business end of business has never interested me.

And ours is a business that requires discipline and focus.

Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business.

Business people do two things with their time fundamentally. The first is that they try to create sales, right? Revenue, key to business. But the other thing they devote their time to equally is cost containment. That is to say, how to not create jobs. Because the fewer jobs you can create for the revenue you create, the more profit you make.

I can walk through the front door of any factory and out the back and tell you if it's making money or not. I can just tell by the way it's being run and by the spirit of the workers.

The most efficient labor-saving device is still money.

In this business, you don't have to be an architect or an engineer or a brick layer. But you have to understand how the money flows. That you can only understand if you're on the site.

Business, numbers, negotiations, all that stuff I wouldn't go near.

Twenty-eight years in business and you understand the importance of problem solving and the importance of efficiency, because if you don't become efficient, you don't run a business well, and you are out of business. And I think some of those principles could be applied to leadership in Washington.

We ought to start running the government like a private-sector business. I have that ability as CEO of our companies. I have line item vetoes, and if I didn't, we'd probably be out of business by now.

Our biggest single theme is trying to make the NIH work better with the same amount of money.

I consider a merchant someone who has a certain intuition and instinct, and - very important - knows how to run a business, knows the numbers.

My business acumen is definitely growing.

Our entire team is focused on managing this company for value - fixing or eliminating those operations that lessen value and expanding or adding those that enhance value.

A boss is all about good business, so start with everything that you can control and you can turn up that costs you nothing, then lay all the knobs out, look at all the controls, all the remotes, and just turn them all up. It don't cost you nothing.

I couldn't sell water in a desert. I have no business acumen. I can tell you why you have no business acumen, and I can tell you why your project may or may not work, but I have no ability to make money.

As a CEO, you have to take the active action to force most of your resources to stand idle from time to time - or go bankrupt.

When companies minimize their costs, they can spend more on R & D and marketing. It's just very logical.

I think I have a pretty decent business savvy, when I give myself room to.

I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs hear all this talk about profitability and realize they need to lower their burn. So, they just start chopping off perks and people.

The first set of questions to ask yourself when you're doing cost cutting is relatively straightforward, which is, you know, can you use the necessity of cost cutting as an opportunity to do pruning or trimming for projects that aren't being as successful? But, you know, frequently those are the easy ones. I mean, there's always some kind of social costs internal to the company, but that's the easy way of looking at the future.

One of my main agenda right from the beginning has been cost rationalization, and we have done a lot of cost rationalization.