"A business like an automobile, has to be driven, in order to get results"
About this Quote
The line lands like boardroom common sense, but it’s really a rebuke: stop treating a business as an object you can polish, park, and admire. Forbes picks the automobile - early-20th-century status symbol and mass-industrial marvel - because it carries a double message. Cars represent modern efficiency, but they also demand attention, fuel, maintenance, and a hand on the wheel. Owning one isn’t the achievement; moving it is.
Forbes’s intent is managerial, almost parental: results come from active direction, not passive ownership. The subtext aims at absentee capital and complacent executives who assume markets will reward them simply for “having” a company, a factory, a product line. In the same way a car left idling goes nowhere, a business left to inertia won’t magically produce profits. “Driven” also quietly endorses a particular kind of leadership - energetic, disciplined, sometimes forceful. It flatters the doer and shames the speculator.
Context matters. Forbes built his reputation championing entrepreneurs and practical business discipline during an era when corporate America was professionalizing and the cult of the executive was forming. The automobile metaphor captures that moment’s faith in motion, speed, and control: modern life accelerates, and management must match its tempo. Underneath the breezy analogy sits a harder claim about accountability: if the enterprise stalls, look for the missing driver, not bad luck.
Forbes’s intent is managerial, almost parental: results come from active direction, not passive ownership. The subtext aims at absentee capital and complacent executives who assume markets will reward them simply for “having” a company, a factory, a product line. In the same way a car left idling goes nowhere, a business left to inertia won’t magically produce profits. “Driven” also quietly endorses a particular kind of leadership - energetic, disciplined, sometimes forceful. It flatters the doer and shames the speculator.
Context matters. Forbes built his reputation championing entrepreneurs and practical business discipline during an era when corporate America was professionalizing and the cult of the executive was forming. The automobile metaphor captures that moment’s faith in motion, speed, and control: modern life accelerates, and management must match its tempo. Underneath the breezy analogy sits a harder claim about accountability: if the enterprise stalls, look for the missing driver, not bad luck.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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