Quotes About Growth

Failure most of all. The greatest teacher failure is.

We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.

When all the people unlocked their doors, they saw that the kingdom had changed. With the towns quiet and the roads empty, the land had grown greener and the skies had grown bluer. The trees were taller, there were flowers everywhere and the air was filled with the singing of birds.

Today, every business, including yours, is being observed and studied by others who want your revenues.

Conventional wisdom won't provide continual growth.

Remind yourself daily to spend more time being interested then interesting.

Innovators "view failure not as a fatal character flaw but as a learning experience.

A small business with a handful of employees might be able to handle two or three concurrent small bets, while a large company with thousands of employees should probably be considering hundreds of potential small bets and implementing scores of them.

Make as many small bets as you have people responsible for making them happen and sufficient financial resources to maximize the odds of success. If there aren't enough resources to give the small bet a chance, you'll never know if it might have worked out or been a possible home run.

When a company is growing it is more likely to acknowledge the importance of its vendors and suppliers and treat them fairly. In return, its suppliers frequently become trusted partners in uncovering new business opportunities. When a company is constantly changing and its revenues and profits are growing you'll generally find a more engaged group of vendors and suppliers who are interested in truly being good business partners

If a business isn't growing between 5 and 10 percent annually, the good, highly talented people won't get the responsibility and the financial rewards they want, and they'll leave.

THE REINVENTION KILLERS Yesterday's Breadwinners Every product or service has a natural life cycle that begins with an introduction, followed by growth, maturity, and inevitably a decline as it becomes yesterday's breadwinner. There are no exceptions

Companies committed to growth make staying ahead of their customers' wants and needs a hallmark of their culture and accomplish that goal through constant radical change and reinvention.

As testament to the passion for change and reinvention that Apple embraces, more than half of the company's revenue comes from products that didn't exist four years ago.

We are working hard to avoid living in our past," he says. Stringer recognized that the real culprit standing in the way of progress at Sony was a tradition-bound mentality and began systematically letting go of the traditions and people that had hamstrung the company.

Companies that do the best job of embracing constant change, growth, and reinvention make it look easy, because they've systematized and scaled all the core business practices. Systematizing means determining the best way to do something (step-by-step), making certain everyone does his or her part the same way (without significant variation), and then using the system as a baseline for continual improvement.

Millner is just as excited about the culture of continuous improvement that is at the core of Cabela's. "Adaptation is critical. You've got to adapt. No matter how successful you are, the minute you can't do what you've done, you've got to let it go. If you don't continuously improve, you die.

thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

Until people are able to figure out how to deal with the natural tendency to hesitate and drag their feet because of their fear of the unknown, no meaningful reinvention will occur.

Decisions about who goes and who stays, who leads and who follows will determine any enterprise's ability to embrace constant change, growth, and reinvention.

We had to figure out a way to come up with big innovations, embrace change, and invent new services and products that would differentiate us from our competition and would let us grow faster than our industry. We were waiting for big ideas instead of using a system to innovate.

But basic smarts are just half of the necessary mind-set. The second half is the ability to learn new things, something a surprising number of people find incredibly difficult.

The late Ken Iverson, credited with originally leading Nucor down the path to constant change and innovation, frequently used a saying still invoked daily at the company: "Anything worth doing is worth failing at.

The most natural action of a senior official is to breed junior officials.