Top 150 Eric Schmidt Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes:.”

— Eric Schmidt

102. “Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”

— Eric Schmidt

103. “The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”

— Eric Schmidt

104. “Praise is underused and underappreciated as a management tool.”

— Eric Schmidt

105. “I had always assumed that the right way to do it was to these engineers, put them in offices by themselves with doors that they could close so they could think deep thoughts. This is a terrible idea.”

— Eric Schmidt

106. “Make sure you would work for yourself.”

— Eric Schmidt

107. “This is why most conference rooms at Google have two projectors. One of them is for videoconferencing with other offices or for projecting meeting notes. The other is for data. When discussing options and opinions, we start the meetings with data. We don’t seek to convince by saying “I think.” We convince by saying “Let me show you.”

— Eric Schmidt

108. “John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, once said, “The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them.”

— Eric Schmidt

109. “The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they’ve actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They’re not sending bombs at each other.”

— Eric Schmidt

110. “The building block of organizations should be small teams. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, at one point had a “two-pizza team” rule,41 which stipulates that teams be small enough to be fed by two pizzas.”

— Eric Schmidt

111. “It should go without saying – but it usually doesn’t, so we’ll say it – that data is best understood by those closest to the issue, which is often not management. As a leader, it is best not to get lost in details you don’t understand, but rather trust the smart people who work for you to understand them.”

— Eric Schmidt

112. “We want to make sure the thing you’re looking for is on Google 100 percent of the time.”

— Eric Schmidt

113. “I had a rule that I had to go to bed before the sun came up. So I used to look up the sunrise times because I thought it would be bad karma to be going to bed as dawn was arriving.”

— Eric Schmidt

114. “Twitter can no more produce analysis than a monkey can type out a work of Shakespeare.”

— Eric Schmidt

115. “People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots.”

— Eric Schmidt

116. “The core problem is that the world is full of people who would like to take 99 per cent of the information that’s on the Internet, and eliminate 1 per cent. Everyone has their own thing they don’t like.”

— Eric Schmidt

117. “You should hire the best engineer you can find, regardless of her coding preference, because if she’s the best she can down enough Java to C how to make the Python Go.”

— Eric Schmidt

118. “The most valuable result of 20 percent time isn’t the products and features that get created, it’s the things that people learn when they try something new.”

— Eric Schmidt

119. “Open up everyone’s calendar so that employees can see what other employees are doing.”

— Eric Schmidt

120. “Dictatorial tendencies rarely contain themselves to just one aspect of work.”

— Eric Schmidt

121. “We have only begun to encounter the realities of a connected world: the good, the bad and the worrisome.”

— Eric Schmidt

122. “There are some people who actually enjoy firing. Beware of them. Firing instills a culture of fear that will inevitably fail, and “I’ll just fire them” is an excuse for not investing the time to execute the hiring process well.”

— Eric Schmidt

123. “Loving a business means having a plan for leaving it, but leaders often neglect to think about who will succeed them.”

— Eric Schmidt

124. “Each country makes a different decision on adult pornography, but the good news is that even governments you hate, hate child pornography.”

— Eric Schmidt

125. “The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy. And that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.”

— Eric Schmidt

126. “The more broadband we can get globally, the better. It’s better for the world; it’s better for our advertisers; it’s better for Google.”

— Eric Schmidt

127. “The average American doesnt realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists.”

— Eric Schmidt

128. “Search companies, which I won’t mention by name, tried to do so many things at the same time, they forgot all about search. They either missed the next revolution of search or they created an opening for a Google to enter.”

— Eric Schmidt

129. “In business, and particularly in high tech, it’s not enough to be great at what you do, you have to catch at least one really big wave and ride it all the way in to shore.”

— Eric Schmidt

130. “Your default mode should be to share everything.”

— Eric Schmidt

131. “Greatest thing in life is to keep the young mind young.”

— Eric Schmidt

132. “I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail.”

— Eric Schmidt

133. “Remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we get the search integrated between YouTube and Google, which we’re working on, it will drive a lot of traffic into both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.”

— Eric Schmidt

134. “The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there’s an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.”

— Eric Schmidt

135. “If you’re going to make a law, make a law that actually works. It’s extraordinarily difficult.”

— Eric Schmidt

136. “Silicon Valley’s involvement with Washington dates from one event, which was John Scully – who was the CEO of Apple – had dinner with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1993. And we’re all going, like, ‘What’s going on? Why would we have dinner with the president?’”

— Eric Schmidt

137. “Twitter is not a technology company, it is a publishing company.”

— Eric Schmidt

138. “Companies come up with elaborate, often passive-aggressive ways to say no: processes to follow, approvals to get, meetings to attend. No is like a tiny death to smart creatives. No is a signal that the company has lost its start-up verve, that it’s too corporate. Enough no’s, and smart creatives stop asking and start heading to the exits.”

— Eric Schmidt

139. “The nice thing about meetings is that the higher up you are on the food chain, the less you have to prepare for them.”

— Eric Schmidt

140. “You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product.”

— Eric Schmidt

141. “I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.”

— Eric Schmidt

142. “Washington – having spent a lot of time there, I grew up there and have spent a lot of time there recently – is largely defined by detailed analytical views and policy choices that are not very good. You know, each policy choice has a winner and a loser, right? Somebody’s ox is getting gored.”

— Eric Schmidt

143. “For many people, work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home.”

— Eric Schmidt

144. “By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded.”

— Eric Schmidt

145. “It’s a mistake to predict the size of markets that are so new. This model has shown no signs of slowing down. So we are going to get as much of it as we possibly can, and when we get close to that we’ll figure out other problems.”

— Eric Schmidt

146. “Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.”

— Eric Schmidt

147. “The right strategy has a beauty to it, a sense of many people and ideas working in concert to succeed. Start by asking what will be true in five years and work backward. Examine carefully the things you can assert will change quickly, especially factors of production where technology is exponentially driving down cost curves, or platforms that could emerge. In a five-year timeline there are disrupters – and opportunities – in many markets. What will be the disrupters affecting you?”

— Eric Schmidt

148. “Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone else’s success.”

— Eric Schmidt

149. “In many countries adult pornography legislation is an attempt to legislate something else.”

— Eric Schmidt

150. “This is the power of coaching in general: the ability to offer a different perspective, one unaffected by being “in the game.”

— Eric Schmidt