Quotes from Notables in the Business World

I read a lot of news about business leaders and was quite surprised by these quotes that I read in the WSJ last week, from Rupert Murdoch and Hans Vestberg of Ericsson. Murdoch, the owner of the WSJ, was asked about mistakes the company has made, and they brought up one of their worst decisions, buying MySpace.com a few years ago for more than $650 million.

“Well, we just messed it up. The buck stops with me. But we didn’t know. It was growing like crazy, and the chief executive of Fox and myself said, ‘well, we don’t know enough. We have to get advice.” We took that advice and put in a layer of bureaucracy from our own company that didn’t know any more than we did to study it. And it was completely the wrong way.

“We should’ve had faith in that management, and let it run, or changed it and found someone. But we learned from it. You’ve got to learn from these experiences.”

Then Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson added this interesting quote: “The majority of the Earth’s population that will be connected to the Internet, they will not have had the black-and-white TV, color TV, the computer, a laptop, a feature phone and then a smartphone. They will start at the end. They will start with a smartphone.”