Quotes About Competition

There is no need to outrun the lion. All that is necessary for a man to do in order to survive is to outrun his friends.

Money never sleeps, pal

Competition on dimensions other than price - on product features, support services, delivery time, or brand image, for instance - is less likely to erode profitability because it improves customer value and can support higher prices. p.32

Understanding the competitive forces, and their underlying causes, reveals the roots of an industry's current profitability while providing a framework for anticipating and influencing competition (and profitability) over time. P. 26

The strongest competitive force or forces determine the profitability of an industry and become the most important to strategy formulation. The most salient force, however, is not always obvious. P. 26

But history tells us that monopolies that are truly benevolent and effective are rare.

Standardized process guidelines belie the complexity of individual patient circumstances, and freeze care delivery processes rather than foster innovation. What is needed is competition on results, not standardized care. What is needed is competition on results, not just evidence-based medicine. There should be no presumption that good quality is more costly.

As important as the dimensions of rivalry is whether rivals compete on the same dimensions. When all or many competitors aim to meet the same needs or compete on the same attributes, the result is zero-sum competition. P. 33

If the forces are intense, (..) almost no company earns attractive returns on investment. If the forces are benign, (..) many companies are profitable. P. 25

Competition has taken place at the wrong levels, and on the wrong things. It has gravitated to a zero-sum competition, in which the gains of one system participant come at the expense of others. Participants compete to shift costs to one another, accumulate bargaining power, and limit services. This kind of competition does not create value for patients, but erodes quality, fosters inefficiency, creates excess capacity, and drives up administrative costs, among other nefarious effects.

Understanding industry structure is also essential to effective strategic positioning P. 26

If a firm can spot an industry in which the fragmented structure does not reflect the underlying economics of competition, this can provide a most significant strategic opportunity. A company can enter such an industry cheaply because of its initial structure. Since there are no underlying economic causes of fragmentation, none of the investment costs or risks of innovations to change underlying economic structure need be borne.

Believers in liberal freedom should worry not whether their regime can prevail in competition with authoritarian ones, but whether they can prevail against their own forms of institutional entropy: elite capture, corruption, and inequality.

I am thinking of the everyday ways that conscientious, well-to-do parents help their kids. Even the best, most inclusive educational system would be hard pressed to equip students from poor backgrounds to compete on equal terms with children from families that bestow copious amounts of attention, resources, and connections

I play to win, whether during practice or a real game.

Whoever is the team leader of the team, I'm going to be going after him. And I'm not going to do it with my voice.' Because I had no voice. I had no status. I had to do it with the way that I played.

Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino.

It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.

But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.

If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.

One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with those in the more conventional sorts of bond broking, had been squashed by Internet competition.

The game has some of the feel of trading, just as jousting has some of the feel of war.

He was the person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands.

Losing shouldn't be fun. It's not fun for me. If I'm going to be miserable, you're going to be miserable.