father

"Reinhold Würth will often speak later in his life about how he sees himself as a link in the chain of his ancestors. And his primal trust in the family was never broken. Even the worldwide success of his screws began with his grandfather, because it was he who sent his father to apprentice with a screw wholesaler, and now also advised on how to set up his own shop – which Reinhold Würth would take over ten years later."

"My father was an old-fashioned businessman. He was honest and valued friendship, trading only for the livelihood of the family, and could not be called an entrepreneur or operator. "Business is done in practice," are words of wisdom my father lovingly instilled in me. However, sometimes I couldn't quite agree with some of his practices. Therefore, my father was both my teacher and an example of what not to do. Nevertheless, there's no doubt my father had a great impact on me."

"When I gradually understood the principles of doing business, I felt that I could not let this state continue, so I told the six clerks in the store how to do the right thing. But what happened next surprised me: these clerks began to resign. Two years later, only Mr. Ura was left. I never intended to have a fallout with these old clerks, maybe they thought I was wrong, maybe they were shaken by the future development of the store, which led to this regrettable result. But even when old employees like the store manager submitted their resignations, my father never blamed me. On the contrary, one day, he handed me the company's important account books and seals. If I were in his shoes, seeing these old employees leaving one after another, I would definitely say something. Now thinking back, I feel that my father is really great, truly a respected businessman. I guess my father might have thought this way: if you really have the determination to do something, go ahead and do it, even if you ruin the company in the end, as long as I am still alive, I can help you recover."

"• At the funeral, I told my relatives and friends, "My father was my greatest competitor in my life." That was the first time I wept openly in public."

"My father reveled in the joy of figuring things out, especially anything mechanical. He could hold his own with the smartest person at the party but preferred to be in the quiet of his shop; he was an intellectual in white sports socks."

"The lawnmower was assembled from spare parts, with precious few safety features, by my father, a born inventor who loved to build and repair things in the cavernous, white wooden building behind the house that he called simply “the barn.” But it never held a farm animal that I know of, and there was no hay. A more appropriate name would have been the laboratory, a place where he could repair—or invent—virtually anything. It was one of innumerable mechanical projects started by my father, many of which lay half-completed on the work benches in the barn, including some of the first models of working TV sets. Embedded in the things he built, or the motors that he repaired, were lessons for solving complex issues that lay ahead. My father was a soft-spoken man, but his expectations were clear, and I yearned for his approval. No matter his mood, he remained stone-faced and unflappable."

"When it comes to emotions, I am more of a stoic like my father. Happiness seems to me a relative measure, because it must be juxtaposed to expectation. If you walk through life expecting everything to be wonderful and trouble-free, you will never be what most people consider happy."

"So I had the wonderful job of explaining to the nurse, who was truly in love with my father, that it was over and she had to leave immediately. I made it comfortable for her financially, but it was still brutal. A month or two later my father and Janice got so very sweetly married. She told me she had always been in love with my father, but had to wait almost fifty years for that love to be consummated. They were together for nearly two years lolling happily on the world’s most luxurious cruise ships, getting off one and boarding another with maybe a week’s pause between."

"Sometimes, though, the power of the unspoken word can be a frighteningly powerful thing and my father’s studied silence with me for the rest of that day spoke volumes. In addition, the fact that he’d immediately jumped in and vehemently defended his light-fingered son’s integrity made me feel more guilt-ridden and miserable than if he had berated me in front of her."

""A friend asked me some time ago, what was the most demanding thing my father required from me. I think it was honesty.""

"“In the end, I decided to get down to designing my car first, and to plan the assembly of it later. I received a pleasant surprise toward the end of the summer of 1900, when the Gulinelli brothers asked me to join them. My father kindly agreed to participate in a small way, although he had little faith in the success of my undertaking."

""Here, everyone feels flattered if the cosmopolitan Berggruen asks for an appointment." – It was the same with his father."

""I have always been on my own. Just like my father. He believed that I had to make my own experiences with success and failure.""

"Having experienced my father’s bankruptcies, and knowing something about how many new restaurants went belly-up, I was soberly aware that failure was a real possibility."

"My mother was an interesting role model. She gave us a lot of bene- fit of that precise thinking that came from accounting. My father, on the other hand, was an extremely creative, almost wild-eyed visionary, and we saw the balance of the two. If anything came of that, it was that my mother added the anchor to my father's creativity. I learned fairly young that if you didn't do the precision part, the creative part would evaporate. You had to have the foun- dation under the creativity."

"It was a busy time for me: within a month of bidding for Landsbanki, I also engineered the Pharmaco–Delta pharmaceuticals merger, creating the company that would later become Actavis. Now, at the age of 35, I had most of my assets in the country, controlling with my father two of its biggest companies."