Quotes About Business

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.

All organizations must be capable of change. We need concepts and measurements that give to other kinds of organizations what the market test and profitability yardstick give to business. Those tests and yardsticks will be quite different.

It might be asked, are all these policies and practices necessary? Don't they interfere with the entrepreneurial spirit and stifle creativity? And cannot a business be entrepreneurial without such policies and practices? The answer is, perhaps, but neither very successfully nor for very long.

Toshiba and Hitachi made better sets at the time, only they showed them on the Ginza in Tokyo and in the big-city department stores, making it pretty clear that farmers were not particularly welcome in such elegant surroundings. Matsushita went to the farmers and sold its televisions door-to-door, something no one in Japan had ever done before for anything more expensive than cotton pants or aprons.

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner's job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one's own property.

It is always futile to restore normality; "normality" is only the reality of yesterday. The job is not to impose yesterday's normal on a changed today; but to change the business, its behaviors, its attitudes, its expectations – as well as its products, its markets, and its distributive channels – to fit the new realities

The entrepreneur,' said the French economist J. B. Say around 1800, 'shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.' But Say's definition does not tell us who this 'entrepreneur' is. And since Say coined the term almost two hundred years ago, there has been total confusion over the definitions of 'entrepreneur' and

If there is one point on which all authorities on Japan are in agreement, it is that Japanese institutions, whether business or government agencies, make decisions by consensus. The Japanese, we are told, debate a proposed decision throughout the organization until there is agreement on it. And only then do they make the decision.

Nothing succeeds like concentration on the right business. And if the company is not in the right business, diversification will no more make it a "growth company," than a man with a broken hip will be restored to health, by being taken on a twenty-mile forced march with an eighty-pound pack on his shoulders.

Still, entrepreneurial strategy remains the decision-making area of entrepreneurship and therefore the risk-taking one. It is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgement.

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers' needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager's business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.

Concept of the Corporation.

A family member in a family business has a position of authority and power, regardless of his title and rank, even regardless of his job. He has the inside track to the top—as a son, a brother, a brother-in-law. No matter what his rank, he is top management. If he cannot command the respect due a member of top management on his own merit and on the basis of his performance, he should not be allowed to stay on the payroll.

Its five business principles are "respect for humans," "customer satisfaction," "social responsibility," "value creation," and "innovation orientation.

There are a number of tasks which are top-management tasks, not because top management is the "top"—that is, because it has the legal authority or the power—but because they are tasks that can be discharged only by people who are capable of seeing the whole business and of making decisions with respect to the whole business.

Protectionism could indeed make the world economy poor and impede its functioning to the point of near-collapse. But it cannot destroy the common demands. It cannot undo the worldwide horizon and vision. The fundamental change has happened irrevocably. The question is not whether it will remain. The question is whether it can be turned to advantage—for society, for the individual, and for the business enterprise.

The question to ask is not "What is top management?" The question is "What are the specific things to be done in this business which are of crucial importance to the success and survival of the business and which can be done only by top management?

I once spent a night at a truck stop in Shandong Province, on the east coast, asking drivers about what they carried. Two men had a truck full of bamboo whisk brooms; they had just dropped off a shipment of non-ferrous metal... Others had gone from chemical materials to radiators, from tennis shoes to dynamos. They were the alchemists of the new economy, at the center of every mysterious exchange that occurs along the Chinese road system.

The prevalence of surprise in the world of business is evidence that uncertainty is more likely to prevail than mathematical probability.

Investing without research is like playing stud poker and never looking at the cards. For some reason the whole business

This is a crucial safeguard of our capitalist system, because if shareholders could be sued whenever a company made a mistake, people like you and me would be afraid to buy shares and become investors. Why would we want to run the risk of being held responsible for another big oil spill, or a rat hair in a hamburger, or the endless variety of mishaps that occur in business every day? Without limited liability, nobody would want to buy a single share of stock.

So while the smaller fast growers risk extinction, the larger fast growers risk a rapid devaluation when they begin to falter.

By now you might be wondering what's the point of investing in a stodgy old company such as IBM, GM, or U.S. Steel? There are several reasons you might do this. First, big companies are less risky, in that they generally are in no danger of going out of business. Second, they are likely to pay a dividend. Third, they have valuable assets that might be sold off at a profit.