Noteworthy and Quoteworthy Quotes from the Business World

Here is a collection of noteworthy quotes from recent business stories. I’ve collected mostly good quotes along with a few examples of not-so-good quotes.

You would expect that media types to excel at soundbites and pull quotes, since it’s the grist for their daily mills. The Los Angeles Times ran a story on August 21 about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp trying to take the lead in creating a revenue stream for mainstream media’s online efforts. In the story, Times reporter Dawn C. Chmielewski used some effective quotes from media executives:

William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP and chief executive of MediaNews Group Inc. has been waging a campaign against the unauthorized use of AP content on the Internet by search engines and other news aggregators. Chmielewski quoted him as saying: “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore.” (A quote is an effective “grabber,” and this quote is particularly telling  if you remember the source: it was the rant of the unhinged network anchorman, Howard Beale, in the 1976 movie “Network.”)

Chmielewski came up with a partial quote from Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Thomson who called internet news aggregators, “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet.” (Clearly he’s mad as hell, too, and came up with a terrific, vivid word picture in service of his rage.)
There appears a lot to be mad about. According the the Times story, newspaper advertising revenue fell 28 percent in 2008 and although online readership of papers has grown, internet advertising has not kept pace, accounting for only 12 percent of their revenue.  So here’s a final quote from the article, by newspaper analyst John Morton: “The only positive thing to be said for online revenue for newspapers is it’s going down less rapidly.” Ouch!

Sticking with the online world, our other examples involve Yahoo’s decision to turn its internet searches over to Microsoft’s Bing.
From Darren Chervitz, who co-manages a fund which owns about 100,000 shares of Yahoo, came this very graphic word picture: “It feels kind of like a stab in the chest. It certainly feels like Yahoo is giving away their strong and hard-fought share of the search market for really a modest price.” (I teach the 30-10-3 rule: the ideal soundbite or pull quote should be no more than 30 words long, take no longer than 10 seconds to speak and be composed of no more than 3 sentences. Mr. Chervitz’ quote was only two sentences long and took me under ten seconds to speak aloud. Depending upon whether you count “hard-fought” as one or two words, it is either 32 or 33 words — certainly close enough for an A minus grade.)

The CEOs of Yahoo and Microsoft weighed in with these comments:

Carol Bartz, of Yahoo: “This deal allows Yahoo to invest in what we should be investing in for the future — audience properties, display advertising and the mobile Internet experience. Our vision is to be the center of people’s lives online.” Her last sentence — which would have been more effective had it been her first sentence — was the strong part. The rest was near-jargon (can anyone tell me in ten words or less what “audience properties” are and why mobile internet had to be followed by “experience?”)

Steven A. Ballmer, of Microsoft:  “Look, she got 88 percent of the revenue and none of the cost. I got an opportunity to swing for the fences in search.” (Twenty-four words and a nice word picture at the end. Although it raises the question of just how comfortable a marriage this is going to be since you can just sense the resentment about the 88 percent/none of the cost part.)

And here’s a quote that didn’t work too well. It’s from Chris Lien, chief executive of a software company whose products help advertisers manage search budgets: “Right now it looks like a camel designed by committee, which is never pretty. I predict within a year or two they will restructure this to make it more streamlined.” If you’re going to reference a phrase everyone’s familiar with, get it right! The expression is, “A camel is a racehorse designed by committee.” Perhaps what Mr. Lien was driving at was that this was an even more egregious case of committee design. If so, it would have been more effective if he’d phrased it:  “You know the expression, a camel is a racehorse designed by committee? Well this is even worse, it’s a CAMEL designed by committee.” (Two sentences, 23 words and — absent Paul Harvey-like pauses — easily spoken in seven to eight seconds.)