Henry Singleton Quotes
14 quotes from Henry Singleton — Founder and CEO of Teledyne, a conglomerate he built through aggressive acquisitions and stock buybacks..
“I don't believe all this nonsense about market timing. Just buy very good value and when the market is ready that value will be recognized.”
“The principal reason is the natural desire of companies to survive. If you remain in one single line, you will not survive. Everything has its day.”
“Concurrent with the instinct for survival is the desire to grow. If you want to grow — the purpose being clearly to increase the company's strength and give it greater potential for survival — this can be accomplished by having a number of lines and phasing out the old ones as time goes by.”
“Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business... if one took the 100 top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's.”
“Henry Singleton was this very brilliant, intellectual type who could foresee all these problems that no one else could see, and he saw opportunities. Henry was as intellectual as anyone I had come across.”
“He understood how to move between real assets and financial assets in a way you don't see today. He was the most brilliant industrialist that I've ever met, and I've met many.”
“The principal reason is the natural desire of companies to survive. If you remain in one single line, you will not survive. Everything has its day. You can't wait to see what is going to replace what you are doing.”
“If earnings tripled from operations, they rose another sevenfold from asset management.”
“The failure of business schools to study men like Singleton is a crime. Instead, they insist on holding up as models executives cut from a McKinsey & Company cookie cutter.”
“I know a lot of people have very strong and definite plans that they've worked out on all kinds of things, but we're subject to a tremendous number of outside influences and the vast majority of them cannot be predicted. So my idea is to stay flexible.”
“My only plan is to keep coming to work every day. I like to steer the boat each day rather than plan ahead way into the future.”
“If everyone's doing them, there must be something wrong with them.”
“Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the top 100 business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as that of Singleton, who incidentally was trained as a scientist, not an MBA.”
“His results are a mile higher than anyone else… utterly ridiculous.”
