Top 90 Michael E. Gerber Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Systems run the business and people run the systems.”

— Michael E. Gerber

Featured in: Small Business Quotes

2. “Systems permit ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results predictably.”

— Michael E. Gerber

3. “If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business – you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!”

— Michael E. Gerber

4. “Organize around business functions, not people. Build systems within each business function. Let systems run the business and people run the systems. People come and go but the systems remain constant.”

— Michael E. Gerber

5. “Great businesses are not built by extraordinary people but by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

— Michael E. Gerber

6. “Building a World Class Company is a commitment to the integration of passion, purpose, and practice.”

— Michael E. Gerber

7. “Most entrepreneurs fail because they are working IN their business rather than ON their business.”

— Michael E. Gerber

8. “If everybody’s doing everything, then who’s accountable for anything?”

— Michael E. Gerber

9. “If your business requires your presence you don’t have a business, you have a job.”

— Michael E. Gerber

10. “The true start-up of a business is what happens before you start-up.”

— Michael E. Gerber

11. “I believe the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.”

— Michael E. Gerber

12. “The work we do is a reflection of who we are. If we’re sloppy at it, it’s because we’re sloppy inside. If we’re late at it, it’s because we’re late inside. If we’re bored by it, it’s because we’re bored inside, with ourselves, not with the work. The most menial work can be a piece of art when done by an artist. So the job here is not outside of ourselves, but inside of ourselves. How we do our work becomes a mirror of how we are inside.”

— Michael E. Gerber

13. “The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities.”

— Michael E. Gerber

14. “Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace: “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.”

— Michael E. Gerber

15. “A true business opportunity is the on that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on.”

— Michael E. Gerber

16. “Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but that the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely necessary for you to do so.”

— Michael E. Gerber

17. “Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives.”

— Michael E. Gerber

18. “With no clear picture of how you wish your life to be, how on earth are you going to live it?”

— Michael E. Gerber

19. “You have to see the pattern, understand the order and experience the vision.”

— Michael E. Gerber

20. “Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.”

— Michael E. Gerber

21. “Drastic change creates an estrangement from the self, and generates a need for a new birth of a new identity. And it perhaps depends on the way this need is satisfied whether the process of change runs smoothly or is attended with convulsions and explosions. Eric Hoffer The Temper of Our Time E.”

— Michael E. Gerber

22. “Tolerance for failure is a very specific part of the excellent company culture – and that lesson comes directly from the top. Champions have to make lots of tries and consequently suffer some failures or the organization won’t learn. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. In Search of Excellence.”

— Michael E. Gerber

23. “A martial arts practice hall, a dojo, is a place you go to practice being the best you can be. But the true combat in a dojo is not between one person and another as most people believe it to be. The true combat in a martial arts practice hall is between the people within ourselves.”

— Michael E. Gerber

24. “Documentation is an affirmation of order.”

— Michael E. Gerber

25. “Life is about choices; it’s not about excuses. Excuses only trap us into believing that we cannot take control of our own lives.”

— Michael E. Gerber

26. “Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon and an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, once said about his company: “In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope.” The commodity is cosmetics; the product, hope.”

— Michael E. Gerber

27. “The Model Will Provide Consistent Value to Your Customers, Employees, Suppliers, and Lenders, Beyond What They Expect.”

— Michael E. Gerber

28. “If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business – you have a job.”

— Michael E. Gerber

29. “Accountability literally means “stand up and be counted.”

— Michael E. Gerber

30. “What is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?”

— Michael E. Gerber

31. “To The Manager, then, The Technician becomes a problem to be managed. To The Technician, The Manager becomes a meddler to be avoided. To both of them, The Entrepreneur is the one who got them into trouble in the first place!”

— Michael E. Gerber

32. “Quality is just a word, and an empty word at that, if it doesn’t include harmony, balance, passion, intention, attention. “Continuous improvement for its own sake is a waste of time. “Life is what a business is about, and life is what this work is about. Coming to grips with oneself, in the face of an incredibly complex world that can teach us if we’re open to learn.”

— Michael E. Gerber

33. “If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business – you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic! “And, besides, that’s not the purpose of going into business. “The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.”

— Michael E. Gerber

34. “The key to becoming an entrepreneur is to be willing to start your business all over again.”

— Michael E. Gerber

35. “The greatest business people I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.”

— Michael E. Gerber

36. “All you need to do is begin living your life as if it were important. All you need to do is take your life seriously. To create it intentionally. To actively make your life into the life you wish it to be.”

— Michael E. Gerber

37. “The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.”

— Michael E. Gerber

38. “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster. – Steven R. Covey.”

— Michael E. Gerber

39. “The Franchise Prototype is also the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business.”

— Michael E. Gerber

40. “There was absolutely no consistency to the experience.”

— Michael E. Gerber

41. “Ouspensky was saying that hell on earth is life as we have always lived it, and heaven on earth is breaking free of our long-standing patterns.”

— Michael E. Gerber

42. “What is your Primary Aim? Where is the script to make your dreams come true?”

— Michael E. Gerber

43. “Systems theory looks at the world in terms of the interrelatedness of all phenomena, and in this framework an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts is called a system. Fritjof Capra The Turning Point.”

— Michael E. Gerber

44. “What’s the difference? The commodity is the thing your customer actually walks out with in his hand. The product is what your customer feels as he walks out of your business. What he feels about your business, not what he feels about the commodity.”

— Michael E. Gerber

45. “Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘to become what we truly are.’”1 And.”

— Michael E. Gerber

46. “There is no such thing as undesirable work,” he continued. “There are only people who see certain kinds of work as undesirable. People who use every excuse in the world to justify why they have to do work they hate to do. People who look upon their work as a punishment for who they are and where they stand in the world, rather than as an opportunity to see themselves as they really are.”

— Michael E. Gerber

47. “Begin by quantifying everything related to how you do business. I mean everything.”

— Michael E. Gerber

48. “They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are. Aldous Huxley.”

— Michael E. Gerber

49. “You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, not by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it. Carlos Castaneda.”

— Michael E. Gerber

50. “Most people today are not getting what they want. Not from their jobs, not from their families, not from their religion, not from their government, and, most important, not from themselves. Something is missing in most of our lives. Part of what’s missing is purpose. Values. Worthwhile standards against which our lives can be measured. Part of what’s missing is a Game Worth Playing.”

— Michael E. Gerber