John Allison Quotes

You change your business plan to anticipate and adapt to changes in the marketplace.

Nobody has a crystal ball, and part of evolving a business plan is to say, 'I might have said we're going left, but I see the opportunity and we're going right.'

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

Moving with the times is an important idea for strategy today.

You don't know what's going to happen in our business a year from now... so you have to be flexible and adaptable, and that's what we try to do.

But I don't bet the farm on any of those possibilities, either. I'm also preparing, intelligently, to walk away from this, and walk away from it happy to have had the experience.

In any business, you have to evolve.

We approached Yahoo and Jerry Yang and said that Hadoop is going to continue to be popular, and as it does, more and more of your team is going to get poached by other companies and come under pressure to leave. This way, you can control your own fate and destiny.

Just like any business is a living, breathing thing, an entrepreneur has to be able to adapt over time.

You can't get married to any one particular plan. That is the biggest lesson I learned at PayPal.

When you face unexpected events, you have to try to overcome those problems, but at the same time, you have to continue working according to the plan that you defined since the beginning. So that's what we have tried to do - not to avoid the urgent responses but to continue the route that we had defined.

One thing I've learned about his business is this whole 'plan thing' - it doesn't work.

The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient.

I never had a plan. I have to say, I'm very shocked when people start a company and say, 'In five years I want to launch a perfume, or in 10 years I want to have this.' How can you know?

Security... it's simply the recognition that changes will take place and the knowledge that you're willing to deal with whatever happens.

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.

The nature of the global business environment guarantees that no matter how hard we work to create a stable and healthy organisation, our organisation will continue to experience dramatic changes far beyond our control.

We cannot assume that past successes will insure future successes.

Major organizational changes create uncertainty. But the point is to move quickly - faster than you are comfortable - because in hindsight, you will always wish you had made changes even sooner.

If you are a small company taking on a big company, you need to have a sense of humor.

For organisations, flexibility is a must to cope with fluctuations in demand and remain competitive, and people must be able to develop adaptable attitudes to quickly embrace evolving business conditions, new business opportunities, and shifting strategies.

It is such an uncertain universe out there that you have to create what I call 'real' options and develop capabilities that will enable you to deal with an environment that will change anyway.

I think we operate in a very dynamic marketplace, and as such, we need to constantly innovate.

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.