No one in my family had a retail or marketing background. They were professionals. They didn't understand just what I was doing by going into retailing. After I started, though, it got into my blood. I knew this was what I wanted.
I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on.
I want to safeguard the value of lunch. For me, it is sacred. My family and I always have lunch and dinner together. And we always sit down. Food does not taste the same if you are standing up!
I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country.
Sports have always been a really important part of how I energize myself, as well as how I relax. I spend a lot of my spare time with my family playing tennis, biking and rollerblading.
Cooking for my family is always a pleasure when I'm able to do it. My favorite thing to make is really whatever my kids ask for on any given day. It's more about being with them and doing something together.
The one thing that people don't get about GE is that, to the people who work here, it's not a company. It's not just a job. You feel like you're part of a 120-year-old ever-growing, ever-improving family.
As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.
Because I'm around comedians all the time, in my downtime I tend not to watch comedy. Something the whole family enjoys is 'You've Been Framed!' It satisfies all of us. It's universal, and we all laugh a lot.
Don't forget I'm from a military family. I was in special training in the army. I am tall, sporty and - how do you say - you can always protect yourself... I have very strong security.
I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother's father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.
To me, wealth is the peace of mind you have, your family, your friends, your colleagues. Everything else is just money, and it really is funny how people pay so much attention to that.
It's more than just high quality food for the family table; it's growing the food in a way that does not harm the environment. That gives me emotional well-being that is important to me.
I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photogr...
Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two - beauty and violence - live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be ...
Groupon as a company - it's built into the business model - is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We've carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.
Most small business owners are not particularly sophisticated business people. That's not a criticism; they're passionate about cutting hair or cooking food, and that's why they got in the business, not because they have an MBA.
Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer.
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently... This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
Over the past decade... while many businesses have pursued what I call 'business as usual,' I have been part of a different, smaller business movement, one that tried to put idealism back on the agenda.
I built the business exactly the way my mother built and ran her family. I wanted a replication of the big, happy family I grew up in. I wanted happy people having fun.
