Frans van Houten Quotes

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.

In any business, you have to evolve.

The emphasis on innovation and technology in our companies has resulted in a few of them establishing global benchmarks in product design and development, manufacturing practices and human resource capabilities. However, there is no room for complacency.

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

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

Any company has got to reinvent itself again and again.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

If a product's future is unlikely to be remarkable - if you can't imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product - it's time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.

The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish.

The underlying principles of strategy are enduring, regardless of technology or the pace of change.

There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.

Successful enterprises are built from the ground up. You can't assemble them with a bunch of acquisitions.

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.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

My view is that, as management, the focus has to be on having a strategy and executing it. As you do the strategy and execution, it is important to communicate it consistently.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

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

When you're a large company with significant market share, it's tempting to view market disruptions as a threat, but we view them as an opportunity.

Build a company that changes the way things get done!

Challenges need to be given to an organization.

I know firsthand the complexities of leading an enterprise through business and technology transformation. It takes intense focus, a strong drive, and a clearly communicated vision to inspire and take an organization from where they are, to where they need to be - or where they want to go.

We know our future's not guaranteed, so every day, we have to relentlessly pursue additional actions to drive our competitiveness.

As CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, we used a concept called 'search and reapply,' which meant that if we found better ways of doing something, then we would do it.