Edwin Catmull Quotes

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

There are companies with management and companies with money. You can always find money. Management is the key to success in any business.

When companies are successful or not successful, they almost immediately jump to the wrong conclusions about how they got there or why they got there.

Most businesses fail because they want the right things but measure the wrong things, and they get the wrong results.

Eighty percent of the cases used in the typical MBA program are about successful companies. Students graduate with this notion that 'If I do everything that the people in those cases did, then my organization will grow and be successful, too.'

People must be realistic when evaluating their business.

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.

Enterprises that depend on many rarely succeed.

I think every business is definitely different. There are certain businesses where execution is everything.

I love the business of business; I love the risk raking.

I didn't generate my success by being a prognosticator. I developed my reputation building our businesses by building great businesses and making them more efficient.

Just like a script, you need to keep a business plan to yourself.

It's not wise to limit firms' expansion projects. Let us only be limited by the market.

I think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.

People follow proven formulas in any business.

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

I definitely see a correlation between how many things a company gets right and how fast a company grows.

There is something about military history that fascinates me. You find that many battles have been lost by people with very good military background when they fought battles in a battleground they didn't understand. I have seen that in business, too. You have to look at a marketplace like a battle-ground.

We recognize the need to adapt to a changing competitive environment.

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.

Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.

As I've said, in 2007, we're free to go and we'll just have to do what's best for the business.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.