Success Quote by Peter Munk

A clean little sentence that doubles as a warning label. "But you don't get into a business because of personal tastes" isn’t offering career advice so much as drawing a boundary line between the private self and the public machine. The opening "But" matters: it signals he’s rebutting a softer, more romantic rationale someone has offered - passion, preference, identity. Munk answers with a colder operating principle: markets don’t care what you like.

The intent is managerial and defensive. It justifies decisions that might look distasteful, boring, or even morally complicated by insisting on a different metric: opportunity. Subtext: if you’re bringing your palate into the boardroom, you’re already losing. In Munk’s world, taste is noise; advantage is signal. It’s also a way of laundering discomfort. By framing business as something you enter for reasons other than taste, he implies you also stay in it - and do what it requires - despite taste. That’s how extraction industries, finance, and other high-impact sectors often talk about themselves: not as expressions of desire, but as responses to "reality."

Context sharpens the edge. Munk, best known for building Barrick Gold, came up in a late-20th-century corporate culture that prized scale, aggressiveness, and shareholder logic over personal sentiment. In that era’s vocabulary, "personal tastes" sounds like a luxury - almost a frivolity - compared to the hard virtue of discipline. The line works because it’s blunt enough to feel like truth, and broad enough to function as cover: a credo for ambition, and an excuse for whatever ambition needs to ignore.