Success Quote by Stuart Rose

A businessman claiming, "I want to please every woman, every time" is either volunteering for sainthood or slipping on a banana peel of his own making. In the corporate world, where talk is normally buffered by committees and compliance, the line lands with the bluntness of a locker-room boast and the overreach of a mission statement. It sounds like gallantry, but it reads like appetite: the language of desire smuggled into the language of service.

The intent is easy to spot: charm, confidence, a promise of attentiveness. In a retail or consumer-facing context (Rose is best known for Marks & Spencer), "please" can be code for customer satisfaction, with "every woman" standing in for the coveted female shopper. The phrasing tries to turn market segmentation into romance, to make commerce feel personal rather than transactional.

The subtext is where it gets prickly. "Every woman, every time" is totalizing; it frames women as a single audience to win, not as individuals with agency. It also quietly centers the speaker as the actor and women as the scoreboard. Even if meant as a harmless quip, it echoes a familiar corporate habit: translating women into targets, then calling the pursuit respect.

What makes the line work (and backfire) is its double exposure. Heard one way, its audacity is funny, a self-aware exaggeration. Heard another, it’s the old fantasy of omnipotent male competence - the idea that attention, delivered at scale, can substitute for understanding. In an era more attuned to power dynamics and workplace culture, the bravado reads less like confidence and more like a tell.