Talking Shop is a
comprehensive collection of quotations relevant to the international world of business. It
covers over 160 subects, including Money, Power, and Success. This easy-to-use resource is
full of inspirational quotations from over 1,500 influential business figures and
commentators around the world. Detailed author information and source references will help
you find what you want to say and tell you who said it first.
Compiled from the world's
largest and most authoritative business quotations database
Practical source of thoughts
and advice for presentations, reports and speeches
Thematically ordered, with
comprehensive author details
'At last, a business book
I like. It is the best thing that has crossed my desk in a long time ... inside is a rich
collection of some of the shorter things people have said about business in the past 2,000
years or so. On each page is a heady mixture of sense and nonsense, banality, pretension
and humour: it begs you to play the delightful game of matching the quote to the speaker.
Who said this: 'I would have been a success in anything. But I have chosen an activity
that was socially useful and that aspect gives me extra satisfaction'? Any goody-goody
modern businessman could have said the last bit; actually the speaker was Robert Maxwell
- crook and plunderer of his staff's pension fund. I have just opened the book at
random. It falls on the section on communication and the first quote I see says: 'When you
have nothing to say, say nothing' Charles Caleb Colton, British clergyman,
1820.
Another great tip comes from
the Christian Science Monitor in 1963. 'Let us write as if we were writing to a sceptical
aunt. All the rest of the world can look over our aunt's shoulder.' This is the best
advice I have ever seen for corporate memos, proposals or any business
communication. Yet how many memos at your place of work pass the sceptical aunt test? From
my experience, almost none ... Barbara Cassani's view on communication is more to my
liking: 'I say what I mean. You hear what I say. That is the end of it.' ' Lucy
Kellaway, Financial Times
310 pages