Tim Cook Quotes

While it is often true that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it seems like Yahoo's almost obsessive focus on Google is taking away from its other businesses.

Practically every enterprise is threatened and put on the defensive as soon as it comes into existence.

Not all of Microsoft's businesses are successful, but they have every technology possible.

All this improvement is great, but all that does is get us in the game to play for improvements that we need in the future, so that we can be aggressive in the marketplace.

In a period of economic downturn, the overwhelming instinct is to pare back, cut costs, and lay off. If you do that, do so with your strategy in mind. The worst mistake is to cut across the board. Instead, reconnect and recommit to a clear strategy that will distinguish yourself from others.

Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.

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.

Every company has to identify what I call its strategic resources, and make sure that it grabs as much of its strategic resources as possible.

Business is a string of seemingly impossible problems looking for solutions. Each problem you solve creates a new barrier to entry for your next competitor.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

Competitive strategies is a concept or philosophy that's as American as apple pie.

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

I mentor a lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs, and when I see that product is the number-one thing, the only thing that matters, that's a real red flag.

If you are focused on profits right out of the gate, you're gonna have the smallest profitable business that has ever been seen.

The values we developed were instrumental in gaining a competitive advantage.

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

I won't speak for the entertainment industry. I speak for Disney. I've seen people in the industry come to work every morning paranoid about what the other person or other company is doing. That means you're spending time and focus on somebody else's business instead of your own.

I've said it for four decades - work 'on' your business, not just 'in' your business!

Challenges need to be given to an organization.

When the entrepreneur is obsessed with the product and the company has organized all of its activities around that, it's very powerful.

The biggest challenge to thriving in the marketplace is identifying the strategic moves that will keep us ahead of the competition.

I love high-performance technologies, the stuff that's the brains of today's products, and AMD was one of the few companies that had this type of technology. I always believed that it was a company that had great technical capability but needed better business focus.

We've always operated under the belief that you could run a video game business as professionally as you could run a consumer packaged goods business, and you wouldn't diminish creativity.

The best businesses are the ones that are the most paranoid.