A business (company, enterprise or firm) is a legally recognized organization designed to provide goods or services, or both, to consumers, businesses and governmental entities. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies. Most businesses are privately owned. A business is typically formed to earn profit that will increase the wealth of its owners and grow the business itself. The owners and operators of a business have as one of their main objectives the receipt or generation of a financial return in exchange for work and acceptance of risk. Notable exceptions include cooperative enterprises and state-owned enterprises. Businesses can also be formed not-for-profit or be state-owned.

The etymology of "business" relates to the state of being busy either as an individual or society as a whole, doing commercially viable and profitable work. The term "business" has at least three usages, depending on the scope — the singular usage (above) to mean a particular company or corporation, the generalized usage to refer to a particular market sector, such as "the music business" and compound forms such as agribusiness, or the broadest meaning to include all activity by the community of suppliers of goods and services. However, the exact definition of business, like much else in the philosophy of business, is a matter of debate and complexity of meanings.

Quotations about Business. In use the word may refer to many differing activities, such as the activity of buying or selling in trade, a commercial firm or enterprise, one’s personal affairs or concerns, one’s regular occupation, employment, or profession, something acquiring attention, or a situation, matter or happening.

Business is the "art" of making money by selling things or services people want for more than their cost. - Patrick Dixon

Sourced

• The only managers that have simple problems have simple minds.
  • Russell Ackoff. Management f-laws: how organizations really work‎ (2007)

• Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.
  • Jane Austen, John Knighley, in Emma Ch. 34 (1815)

• In civil business: what first? boldness; what second and third? boldness. And yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness, far inferior to other parts.
  • Francis Bacon. ‘Of Boldness’, Essays (1625).

• You cannot Adhere to the teachings of the church on Sunday and not apply to the marketplace on Monday.
  • Archbishop LeRoy Bailey Jr senior pastor of The First Cathedral; From a sermon entitled: He Is Lord

• However successful a man may be in his own business, if he turns from that and engages ill a business which he don't understand, he is like Samson when shorn of his locks his strength has departed, and he becomes like other men.
  • P. T. Barnum, ‘Beware of ‘‘Outside Operations’’’, The Art of Money Getting (1880)

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Tue Jul 27 05:47:42 2010