Lagarde said this in 1999, shortly after becoming the first woman to head up Baker & McKenzie, the world’s second-largest law firm at the time. Her complete remark—when she was asked what advice she would give to an aspiring female lawyer—was: “Grit your teeth, because it is a matter of resilience, stamina, and energy. And never try to imitate what the boys do.” In 2007, Lagarde became France’s minister of economic affairs, industry, and employment, the first woman to hold such a position in a major industrialized country. In 2008, Forbes ranked her as the fourteenth-most powerful woman in the world.
Never let an inventor run a company.
You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market.ROYAL LITTLE, founder of Textron
Never buy at the bottom, and always sell too soon.JESSE L. LIVERMORE, legendary Wall Street trader
Never leave well enough alone.RAYMOND LOEWY
Loewy was one of history’s most famous industrial designers, responsible for such iconic images as the Greyhound bus, the Lucky Strike package, the Shell logo, and the Studebaker Avanti. By tweaking the popular saying Leave well enough alone, he expressed his philosophy of design in a most creative way. The saying, which Loewy chose as the title of his 1951 autobiography, has been adopted as a motto by many entrepreneurs and other professionals committed to finding new and better ways to do things.
Never learn anything about your men except from themselves.GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
The longtime editor-in-chief of the Saturday Evening Post added: “A good manager needs no detectives, and the fellow who can’t read human nature can’t manage it.”
Never be your own hatchet man.HARVEY B. MACKAY, in Swim with the Sharks
Without Being Eaten Alive (1988)
When Mackay came out with Swim with the Sharks, he was the relatively little-known CEO of the Mackay Envelope Company, a Minnesota company he had founded thirty years earlier. A year later, he was an American celebrity. His book had been at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for an entire year, and he was rapidly becoming one of America’s most popular business speakers. He went on to write four more bestsellers, including Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt and Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty, all generously filled with anecdotes and personal observations (often called “Mackay’s Maxims”). Tom Peters said that “Harvey Mackay is a master of brief, biting, and brilliant business wit and wisdom,” and many of Mackay’s best bits of wisdom have been expressed neveristically:
My rule is, never make the same mistake three times.
(on allowing himself one repeat mistake, but no more)
Never accept any proposal immediately, no matter how good it sounds.
Never let anyone, particularly a superstar, pick his or her own successor.
Never make a major decision off the top of your head
or from the bottom of your heart.
Never travel without a tape recorder at your side
so you can “write notes” to yourself while you’re driving.
Never pick up someone else’s ringing phone
(unless you’re prepared to pick up someone else’s headache).MARK H. MCCORMACK, from his 2002 book
Never Wrestle with a Pig
Never take a problem to your boss without some solutions.
You are getting paid to think, not to whine.RICHARD A. MORAN, in his 1993 book
Never Confuse a Memo with Reality
Subtitled And Other Business Lessons Too Simple Not to Know, the book contained 355 aphorisms on aspects of work life that are often overlooked. Here are a half dozen more:
Never let vacation time expire.
Never wear a tie with a stain on it.
Never in your life say, “It’s not my job.”
Never go to a meeting without your calendar.
Never correct a co-worker in front of a customer or client . . . or anyone else.
Never let your guard down among superiors—even when traveling or socializing.
Never sit in the dunk tank at the company picnic.RICHARD A. MORAN, in his 2006 book
Nuts, Bolts, and Jolts: Fundamental Business
and Life Lessons You Must Know
In this sequel to Never Confuse a Memo with Reality, Moran offered 2,000 “prescriptive bullet points” on the nuts and bolts of business life, including the following:
Never babysit the children of your boss.
Never answer your cell phone while in the bathroom.
Never be the last to leave a company going downhill.
Never expect the employees to be truly honest in front of their boss.
Never give a bad reference.
Simply decline to comment if there’s nothing to say.
Never settle for a job,
but be realistic about the kind of jobs for which you are qualified.
Never hesitate to steal a good idea.AL NEUHARTH, in Confessions of an S.O.B. (1989)
Never write an advertisement
which you wouldn’t want your own family to read.DAVID M. OGILVY
This comes from Confessions of an Advertising Man, a 1963 bestseller from one of the most influential figures in advertising history. He added: “You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.” He also offered these thoughts:
Never hire your client’s children.
Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.
Never pick a man because he slobbers all over you with kind words.GEORGE S. PATTON
This quotation appeared in Patton on Leadership (1999) by Alan Axelrod. Patton continued: “Too many commanders pick dummies to serve on their staff. Such dummies don’t know how to do anything except say, ‘Yes.’ ” This is the only Patton neverism in the book, but in attempting to capture Patton’s views on a whole host of topics, Axelrod used a number of neverisms to describe what the military leader believed:
Never confuse decisive decision-making with hasty guesswork.
Never close yourself to suggestion and insight from others,
including from the most junior members of the team.
Never exploit those on whom you depend,
and never give them even the inkling of a feeling that they are
being exploited, cheated, or in any other way treated shabbily.
Never do business with anybody you don’t like.HARRY QUADRACCI, founder of Quad/Graphics
Quadracci called this one of his “ironclad rules,” adding, “If you don’t like somebody, there’s a reason. Chances are it’s because you don’t trust him, and you’re probably right.” The rule served Quadracci well. His company specialized in high-quality and high-volume printing, with customers that included Time, Sports Illustrated¸ and Playboy. When Quadracci died in 2001, his company was one of the world’s largest printing companies, with annual sales of more than $2 billion and 14,000 employees.