Quotes About Business

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

It is more useful to think in terms of themes that pervade many activities, such as low cost, a particular notion of customer service, or a particular conception of the value delivered.

When a population is distracted by trivia," wrote Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, "when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a real possibility.

Permanecí en silencio. No quería decirle que aquello era una práctica común. No quería contarle que en el mundo de los negocios los secretos son dinero, que el miedo es una arma, que el conocimiento es poder.

Certainly, the perception of the average consumer is a vital part of every business, and if a retailer, service provider, or corporation is sending out signals that its approach is lackadaisical, its methods halfhearted, and its execution indifferent, the business in question could suffer severe-and in some cases, irreparable-losses.

Investment bankers make money for a living.

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.

Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. "It was a fast-buck business," says Jacobs. "Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.

The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures—which was, perhaps, why there had been so many more conspicuous failures.

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.

Talking to a programmer type about the trading business was a bit like talking to the house plumber at work in the basement about the card game the Mafia don was running upstairs.

The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease.

mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. "It was a fast-buck business," says Jacobs. "Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.

Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half.

Long Beach Savings was the first existing bank to adopt what was called the "originate and sell" model. This proved such a hit—Wall Street would buy your loans, even if you would not!—that a new company, called B&C mortgage, was founded to do nothing but originate and sell.

The Yankees understood what New York understood, that there was no shame in buying success, and maybe because of their lack of shame they did what they did better than anyone in the business.

If you're in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your bosses to be mad at you.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money.

This wasn't Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody's. The aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And its CEO was being told he was either a fool or a crook, by Vincent Daniel, from Queens. By

People like Justin Frankel and Daniel Sheldon linger on the fringe until they dream up something that has great commercial potential. Then some big company swoops in and buys them, or they give birth to the big company themselves.

I always thought that the biggest opportunity on the Internet was the vertical markets," Clark continued. "I didn't know anything about health care, but I was looking for something worth doing and…

In computing, a monopoly took the form of a toll booth. Bill Gates had his toll booth, the PC operating system. Jim Clark wanted his own toll booth.

The new companies often put the old ones out of business; the young were forever eating the old. The whole of the Valley was a speeded-up Oedipal drama. In this drama technology played a very clear role. It was the murder weapon.

The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease. American cities that didn't did not.