Gary Hamel Quotes

In any business, you have to evolve.

Founders go wrong when they start to believe their business plan will materialize as written. I advise entrepreneurs to burn their business plan - it's simply too dangerous to the health of your business.

There's always something happening in the world that creates an opportunity to try to fix a business and build a business.

Companies that grow for the sake of growth or that expand into areas outside their core business strategy often stumble. On the other hand, companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.

No CEO ever says, 'Damnit, we need to increase research!' I want to encourage them to do that.

We can reorient our products and business strategy because we are an agile organisation.

I believe businesses don't grow or develop in terms of a blueprint. There is a huge element of opportunism involved.

As an entrepreneur, one of my biggest struggles is that you have to focus, but you also have to expand.

Executives need ample flexibility to respond to the market. That means both reducing costs and increasing innovation.

An open-minded person running a business might catch a problem faster than a closed-minded person. And when they identify a problem, they can fix it much faster.

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.

When you start a business, go for the lowest hanging fruit.

For me, the winning strategy in any start-up business is, 'Think big but start small.'

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

Our ultimate goal is to stay in business. We are not here with a specific plan. That's kind of how our entire career has evolved. We will figure things out as we go along.

If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business.

The essence of good business is knowing when to step on a train and when to step off.

As they grow, companies saturate their markets, become more complex and difficult to manage, and face larger and more entrenched competitors.

Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.

I think it's natural for any manager to want to grow his business. The question is at what rate, and in what direction, and in what format?

If you're not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.

What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.

AOL has a great collection of brands, and the question is, 'Can they innovate and scale their business?' And those are very challenging things to do. But I think they are well positioned to grow.

In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running, if you stand still, they will swallow you.

Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.