Quotes About Value

Much of the ability to create and maintain valuable brands, as a consequence, has migrated away from the product and to the channel because, for the present, it is the channel that addresses the piece of added value that is not yet good enough.

once the performance level demanded of a particular attribute has been achieved, customers indicate their satiation by being less willing to pay a premium price for continued improvement in that attribute.

In fact, the prospects for growth and improved profitability in upmarket value networks often appear to be so much more attractive than the prospect of staying within the current value network, that it is not unusual to see well-managed companies leaving (or becoming uncompetitive with) their original customers as they search for customers at higher price points.

Given that aim, technology, as used in this book, means the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value.

sensible resource allocation processes were at the root of companies' upward mobility and downmarket immobility across the boundaries of the value networks in the disk drive industry.

The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward.

This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.

the more successful approach has been to find a new market that values the current characteristics of the disruptive technology. Disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It's a profound insight—first popularized by legendary Harvard marketing professor Ted Levitt decades ago.1

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It's

When the performance of two or more competing products has improved beyond what the market demands, customers can no longer base their choice upon which is the higher performing product.

remember that it is changes in the slope of the platform, not the level of the platform, that create shareholder value at an above-average rate.

Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.

Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.

Real gold doesn't start its journey in a display window at Tiffany. It's dug out of the dirty earth. Sometimes true gold doesn't glitter. It may need a little polishing, but don't let that bit of needed patience or effort trick you into discarding what could be the greatest treasure of your life.

Money here on Earth is more than the paper or the metal that you use for money, more than the rows of figures that account for money. Here on Earth you have given money a symbolism such as no medium of exchange has anywhere else I have ever known or heard of. You have made it a power and a virtue and you have made the lack of it despicable and somehow even criminal. You measure men by money and you calibrate success with money and you almost worship money.

Federal Officer: The arms piled on the ground were not worth 10 cents a ton.

If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn't it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.

Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.

Books are precious things, and cannot be selected like tinned peas in Tesco.

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won't survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities.

If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities.

Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible. It

Each thing had a value and as the value changed, everything else changed also. A broken calabash was worth less than one that held its water, a hook that kept its catfish more prized than one that relinquished its bait. In America the quirk was that people were things.