Quotes About Business

But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.

Harvard Business School Press

In 2002, after acquiring and integrating gum-maker Adams—a move that significantly expanded Cadbury's product and geographic reach—the

More than anything else, this disconnect—between the way planning works and the way decision making happens—explains the frustration, if not outright antipathy, most executives feel toward strategic planning.

To compete in an aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value.

The use of "war games" is a powerful antidote to the lack of thinking about competitors' reactions to proposed moves. 11.

When is the urgency rate high enough? From what I have seen, the answer is when about 75% of a company's management is honestly convinced that business as usual is totally unacceptable. Anything less can produce very serious problems later on in the process.

The profit lure of mass production obviously has a place in the plans and strategy of business management, but it must always follow hard thinking about the customer.

Vision and Priorities In the press of day-to-day activities, leaders often fail to adequately communicate their vision to the organization, and in particular, they don't communicate it in a way that helps their subordinates determine where to focus their own efforts. How often do I communicate a vision for my business? Have I identified and communicated three to five key priorities to achieve that vision? If asked, would my employees be able to articulate the vision and priorities?

can only express a likelihood of purchase in probabilistic terms. Thus

10-percentage-point increase in broadband penetration produces the same lift in the population's subjective well-being as a 2.89% increase in GDP per capita

Job-defined markets are generally much larger than product category-defined markets. Marketers who are stuck in the mental trap that equates market size with product categories don't understand whom they are competing against from the customer's point of view. Notice

A good mood, incidentally, spreads most swiftly by the judicious use of humor. For

While loosening formal controls, companies should tighten interpersonal connections between innovation efforts and the rest of the business.

When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate School of Business's Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness.

Business-unit managers should remain involved in corporate-level strategy planning that affects their units. But a focus on issues rather than business units better aligns strategy development with decision making and investment. Consider

Uhlaner put in place a Growth and Performance Planning Process that starts with agreement by Ballmer's leadership team on a set of strategic themes—major issues like PC market growth, the entertainment market, and security—that cross business-unit boundaries.

Era como una de esas comidas de negocios en las que todo el mundo habla durante tanto tiempo de cosas que nada tienen que ver con el tema, que al final resulta demasiado embarazoso destruir la magia de una ocasión tan deliciosa y puramente social, con lo que uno nunca llega realmente al quid de la cuestión.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.

The business was in a very difficult state when I first took over the company. I walked into a situation where cheques were getting written, popped in drawers, so that when people phoned up, they could honestly say, 'Look, we've signed the cheque. You'll get it ultimately.'

There are several books that I have-the Physics of Star Trek, Star Trek and Business, there are manuals on command style and countless scholarly papers that have been written about the significance of Next Generation.