Bruce Henderson Quotes

If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.

There's always competitors out there, one way or another.

Today, the competition is considerably more intense.

Sometimes, for businesses, competition can be inconvenient, because competition means that the race is never over, the game is never won. No matter how well you were doing in the past, there's always someone who are out there wanting to take your place. So the temptation to avoid competition is powerful. It's rooted in motives as old as Adam and Eve: in greed for yet more money, in fear of losing your position in the market and all the benefits it brings.

Market type influences everything a company does. Strategy and tactics for one market type seldom work for another.

Competition matters.

In business, what do we do? We compete.

Your margin is my opportunity.

I study my competition for at least an hour a day. I get on the internet, look at what they doing, then I look at ways to defeat them.

In the future, it will become increasingly obvious that your competitors are just as clueless as you are.

Just like a script, you need to keep a business plan to yourself.

As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance?

Global competition is about winners and losers.

There is no resting place for an enterprise in a competitive economy.

If you go 90 yards in a hundred-yard race, you come last. Usain Bolt slows down for the last half a yard, but for 99 yards, he is that far ahead that he can. In our business, you can't be far enough ahead. It is such a competitive marketplace.

Understanding how to compete better has really made a difference.

With experience also comes the understanding that you have to beat the rally before you can beat the competition.

It's far, far better to be prepared: the more you know about the other team, the better.

Business is a game, played for fantastic stakes, and you're in competition with experts. If you want to win, you have to learn to be a master of the game.

If you truly don't have competition, then zoom out until you can define some. Competition can be as simple as the reliance on the status quo, Microsoft (since at some point Microsoft will compete with everyone for everything), or researchers in universities. Pick something, because saying you have no competition at all is a nonstarter.

Never let them know your next move.

When I broke in, in 1957, it was wide open. Now you're up against strong competition.

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

Only the player with the initiative has the right to attack.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.