Quotes About Business

Bookselling is like prostitution, you sell your wares, you close your eyes, and you never fall in love with the clients. You also keep your fingers crossed that they won't ask for anything perverted.

As Desdemona continued on about the administrative details of the business, her eyelids lazing at half-mast all the while, Elsie's attention was drawn to the decorations on the office's walls. She had always assumed that dust could only collect on a horizontal surface, but the Unthank Home's drab green walls proved otherwise—a thin sheen of gray dust seemed to nearly act as a second coat of paint.

She admitted that his nerves were ragged. 'But why?' asked Reich. Surely things were going excellently for the company. 'Oh yes,' she said. 'But when a man is President of a concern as big as A.I.U., he gets into the habit of worrying, and sometimes can't stop.

I'm an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur? Pepper said the last part like manure. That's just a hustler who pays taxes.

In his mind, the business of existence was about minimizing consequences. The plague had raised the stakes, but he had been in training for this his whole life.

You never see a fat ventriloquist. Pepper was of the mind that this reflected the parasitic nature of the relationship, wherein the puppet leeches the life essence of the puppeteer. Which gave him an idea for a diet craze: the mass adoption of puppet sidekicks. Send the price of lumber through the roof. From time to time his mind turned to business ventures.

Entrepreneur?" Pepper said the last part like manure. "That's just a hustler who pays taxes.

When trafficking in cadavers, it helped to be immune to sentimentality.

Their opinion: If at the cost of going backwards internally, he restores Germany's power externally, then this cost is worth while. Conditions at home can always be made good later – politics is just not a clean business. [. . .]

Instead of drilling down and finding ways to creatively meet the target cost as Ford did, if companies give in to the tempting route of either bumping up the strategic price or cutting back on utility, they are not on the path to lucrative blue waters.

the strategic price you set for your offering must not only attract buyers in large numbers but also help you to retain them.

The cost side of a company's business model ensures that it creates a leap in value for itself in the form of profit—that is, the price of the offering minus the cost of production. It is the combination of exceptional utility, strategic pricing, and target costing that allows companies to achieve value innovation—a

Every blue ocean will eventually be imitated and turn red

The key here is not to pursue pricing against the competition within an industry but rather to pursue pricing against substitutes and alternatives across industries and nonindustries.

Corporate graveyards are full of companies that got to market first with innovative offerings not linked to value.

It appears, then, that neither the company nor the industry is the best unit of analysis in studying the roots of profitable growth. Consistent with this observation, our study shows that the strategic move, and not the company or the industry, is the right unit of analysis for explaining the creation of blue oceans and sustained high performance. A strategic move is the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering.

while speed may be important, even more important is linking innovation to value. No company should rest easy until it achieves value innovation.

blue ocean strategy is a theory of market creation

In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set.

We don't have a theory of strategy creation

Large R&D budgets are not the key to creating new market space. The key is making the right strategic moves.

Our research reveals that most companies' strategic planning process keeps them wedded to red oceans. The process tends to drive companies to compete within existing market space.

The first involves streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations from manufacturing to distribution.

Unlike the practice of conventional technology innovators, value innovation is based on a win-win game among buyers, companies, and society.