Quotes About Business

Dreams were essential, creativity a must, but details, sweat, and a business plan made dreams a reality.

Oh,right.Like he's been in a monestary copying scripture for the last ten years. Kate squared her shoulders, her feminist flag waving high. It's none of his damn business if you've taken on the Fifth,Six,and Seventh fleets.

And because the family business, the industry of

If you're going to have your own, you have to know how to run a business.

That's the way some people do business. I don't. It was the tone that made Ty stop. He supposed somehow over the past months they'd become friends. Almost family. Near enough that he understood the guilt, and the frustration. Nobody's saying that, David. Nobody thinks that.

According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That's in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are Hellbound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit. As are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads.

Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the wings. On takeoff, as the plane pushed down the runway and the flaps tilted up, with our seats in their full upright position and our tray tables stowed and all personal carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, as the end of the runway ran up to meet us with our smoking materials extinguished, I prayed for a crash.

Every time the plane banked sharply on takeoff or landing, I prayed for a crash, or mid air collision, anything. Life insurance pays triple when you die on a business trip.

successful companies don't succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach. Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong. The

The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.

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

With few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms' managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.

Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business's success.

This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation. By approaching a disruptive business with the mindset that they can't know where the market is, managers would identify what critical information about new markets is most necessary and in what sequence that information is needed.

cost reductions meant survival, but not profitability

It is very difficult for a company whose cost structure is tailored to compete in high-end markets to be profitable in low-end markets as well.

Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead. A big company will burn through money much faster, and a big organization is much harder to change than a small one.

There had, therefore, to be a reason why good managers consistently made wrong decisions when faced with disruptive technological change.

Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography—but successful growth companies optimize around the job.

understand and harness the principles of disruptive innovation.

the innovator's dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products?

railroads fell into the trap of letting the product define the market they were in, rather than the job customers were hiring them to do. They

Principle #1: Companies Depend on Customers and Investors for Resources