Quotes About Competition

As money grows in importance, a new struggle is beginning for the control of it in the coming century. We are likely to see a prolonged era of competition during which many kinds of money will appear, proliferate, and disappear in rapidly crashing waves. In the quest to control the new money, many contenders are struggling to become the primary money institution of the new era.

In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?

From my days in the Pit, I learned that the game is all about fielding the best athletes. Whoever fielded the best team there won. Reuben Gutoff reinforced that it was no different in business. Winning teams come from differentiation, rewarding the best and removing the weakest, always fighting to raise the bar. I was lucky to get out of the pile and learn this my very first year at GE—the hard way, by nearly quitting the company.

It is a thing I have noted, that men will compete with one another even when there is no prize to be gained. Mayhap women are no better, on the whole, but we are more subtle about it, and quicker to reckon the stakes. And quicker to play men for fools.

I stared at him. Maybe it had been hard for him being second best too.

It's obvious you're just a bad loser," said Chloe. "I want my notebook!

And unless you show that you are as good at everything as they are, you find that you spend virtually all your time running behind them screaming like a banshee, 'Me too, me too!

The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.

RIM's chief saw the semiconductor giant as a dangerous, tricky heavyweight whose every employee lived by former CEO Andy Grove's mantra, "Only the paranoid survive.

I had an expression: Never moon the gorilla," Balsillie says. "Microsoft was the gorilla. We cut them by far the widest berth of anyone." Balsillie's strategy for dealing with Microsoft was to undersell RIM's potential. Upon launching BlackBerry, he pitched the device to Microsoft as a pager-like service to promote the software giant's corporate e-mail software, Exchange.

Balsillie followed two Sun Tzu tactics religiously: appear strong no matter how weak your hand; and move to uneven terrain if an aggressor is overwhelming. For Balsillie, rugged ground meant keeping competitors, suppliers, and customers off balance.

If the rise and fall of BlackBerry teaches us anything it is that the race for innovation has no finish line, and that winners and losers can change places in an instant.

In September my chances diminished, because my home district happened to include a strong concentration of Wallace supporters and it seemed possible that Wallace and not Humphrey would wind up in second place, a fear that was enhanced when the straw vote in our local high school showed Nixon winning but with Wallace pressing him in second position. Humphrey finished so far behind that students who had voted for him were conspicuous and were noted unfavorably by their companions.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.

In every business, I've loved meeting my competitors. The reality is there's no such thing as competition. The world is big enough for two people in the same space.

Everything is a game. Understanding the rules allows you to succeed.

Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.

I don't believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.

I don't believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.

People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior

We had, in effect, been playing a deadly game and he was the winner. He was the winner in spite of the fact that I had cheated to win.

It's hard to see the difference between greatness and mediocrity in good times, when almost everyone is thriving. But when the turbulent times come, the difference becomes stark; the companies that exercised productive paranoia far in advance will pull ahead of the weak mediocrities. And even if the ill-prepared survive the disruptive shock, they will likely never close the gap. The strong and well prepared before the storm continue to pull ahead, never to look back.

Be there first, be there fast, build market share—no matter how expensive—and you win," yelled the entrepreneurs.

Multiply, vary, let the strongest [experiments] win, and the weakest die.