Larry Ellison Quotes

Business comes and goes and we make a strategic decision that could lead you to whole new place.

Drucker said: 'If you weren't already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?' ... Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.

Abstract thinking leads to greater creativity... But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view.

Innovation keeps me ahead of my competition. It means that my foes must adapt to me, not the other way around.

Fearlessness is the mother of reinvention.

The more successful enterprises are the more they try to replicate, duplicate, codify what makes us great. And suddenly they're inward thinking. They're thinking how can we continue to do what we've done in the past without understanding that what made them successful is to take risks, to change and to adapt and to be responsive. And so in a sense success breeds its own failure. And I think it's true of a lot of successful businesses.

Whatever worked in the past, build on it; whatever didn't work in the past, break the chain that binds you to it.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

There are as many foolhardy ways to grow as there are to downsize.

For students to understand what the future of journalism is going to be, they're going to have to invent it. It's a big idea. We don't know what journalism is going to look like in the next three years, let alone the next 10 years.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

Doing business is all about providing a good product or service to your customers. A good businessman is he who knows that what is successful today may not be so tomorrow. Technology changes so fast, and so do people's needs and wants. That's why it would do well for a businessman to know how to adapt to change. He must constantly reinvent the business, or it won't last.

Technology is always evolving, and companies.. not just search companies.. can't be afraid to take advantage of change.

You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it.

Building a business is not rocket science, it's about having a great idea and seeing it through with integrity.

To understand a new idea, break an old habit.

We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

Everyone can tell you the risk. An entrepreneur can see the reward.

Take all the rules away. How can we live if we don't change?

It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 30 years on The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven't a clue how we got here!

I understand small business growth. I was one.

Juan Enriquez will change your view of change itself.

If what you're doing isn't working, change it.

We just have to go at 100 miles an hour in all our businesses, be they television broadcasting, be they magazine publishing, be they subscription television, be they online, be they gaming. We just have to go at one hundred miles an hour.

80% of all products and services that will be on the market in five years do not exist today. So therefore, always be innovative, always be creative, always think, 'What new products or services could I create, could I represent, could I joint venture?" Sometimes you can find someone else that has a fabulous product or service that you can use your existing business or resources to sell and you can double your income or sales in your business by selling somebody else's product to the same customers that are buying yours.