James Cash Penney

The art of effective listening is essential to clear communication, and clear communication is necessary to management success.

Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.

We get real results only in proportion to the real values we give.

The well-satisfied customer will bring the repeat sale that counts.

Do not primarily train men to work. Train them to serve willingly and intelligently.

My definition of an executive’s job is brief and to the point. It is simply this: Getting things done through other people.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

You don’t learn to walk by following rules, you learn by doing and by falling over.

Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.

I never went to business school. I was just bumbling through a lot of my life. I was like the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Should I give up my career at this point in my life… and put all my marbles in Laura’s [Nyro] basket?

The other people I don’t take too seriously are the critics-except when they stand in the way of my projects. In my opinion, they mostly write to impress each other, and they’re just as swayed by fashions as anyone else. One week it’s spare glass towers they are praising to the skies. The next week, they’ve rediscovered old, and they’re celebrating detail and ornamentation.

No one should buy on reputation alone. They should come and see it and inspect it, feel it and touch it.

Anyone who criticises me for talking about fair trade is a few pebbles short of a beach. Because everyone should care about it, just like everyone should care about the environment, because we all live here.

From the start I had my own ideas about how the business should run. I wanted it to benefit everybody who contributed to its success-stockholders, labor and the American public.

There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.