Quotes About Strategy

Apple doesn't need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to maintain an impressive-sounding inventory of titles while waiting for entirely new forms of publishing to develop.

A lot of what I do is running businesses rather than buying stocks. My worst decision is probably when I know I have the wrong chief executive running the business, and I keep on waiting to make the difficult decision of replacing him.

I was a more aggressive rider than Armstrong. I would attack more often. He waits for the other guys, then counter-attacks.

Mayweather waits for you to make a mistake. He plays a similar game to me.

Like any good business, I think Nickelodeon waits to see results.

Usually, when a DB is trying to catch up to you, he'll run to your wake because his natural instinct is to trail you so you don't get too much separation.

At the end of the day, I sit down for about five minutes and review all the problems I'm working on, research problems or writing problems, and I go to sleep. Then when I wake up in the morning, I've trained myself to not open my eyes and to just lie there and recall the problems and see if there's anything there.

We really wake up every day trying to build businesses. That is the goal of private equity. It's a misnomer out there that private equity profits by shrinking companies. In fact, it's just the opposite. Private equity creates value by growing great companies.

I'm one of those players that wakes up and has like three fouls already.

Executives are waking up to realize that they can do a lot better, save money, make better decisions if they optimize and start thinking geographically and have a location strategy.

Waking up every day and planning games makes me motivated.

I don't know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

Wal-Mart does not do big mergers, though it will buy much smaller competitors in so-called 'tuck-in acquisitions.'

I say at our management conferences that the amount Wal-Mart grows in just one year is the equivalent of Costco's size.

When you compete with Wal-Mart, even if you think you've found a niche don't ever become complacent.

If Wal-Mart invests a billion dollars and others invest $100 million, Wal-Mart is going to grow more.

Wal-Mart is an amazing success story. What I particularly admire very much about the late Sam Walton was his policy of valuing his employees. Giving value to employees is very rare in the retail industry. I also admire the strategies Walton used to build up his discount store concept.

I believe in the 'Wal-Mart' school of business. The less people pay, the more they enjoy it.

The key to competing and surviving against Wal-Mart is to focus your business into a niche or pocket where you can leverage your strengths in the local marketplace.

To operate a company of the size of Sears Holdings or Wal-Mart or Target or Home Depot or Lowe's, you need a combination of skills, and each of those skills needs to be sufficiently strong.

I've seen articles suggesting that Wal-Mart buys at prices lower than our competitors', and that this gives Wal-Mart an unfair advantage. I don't believe it... What we hear is concern that in some circumstances, Wal-Mart may actually be paying more than our competitors.

You can't be in a certain business and not sell to Amazon or not sell to Wal-Mart. You have to reckon with them, because even though there are other buyers, they're the only buyers that matter.

For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.