Eric Ries Quotes

Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.

You can't just tell your team, 'Think long term.' It doesn't work that way. When you are starting out, you have to always think about trying to build something of value for the customer: something they can use all the time, something of use.

Companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.

Best way to succeed is to do things for the customer, not to the competition. Very few people buy a product in order to help you hurt the competition. To think otherwise is lunacy.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.

It is well worth remembering that the customer is the most important factor in any business. If you don't think so, try getting along without him for a while.

Even in the face of massive competition, don't think about the competition. Just think about the customer.

Companies can add value and simultaneously promote themselves if their product or service truly improves the lives of their customers. I mean really improve lives, not wishful thinking, rationalization. That's the acid test.

Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.

Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

You always think in terms of customer benefit. You always think, "How could I really benefit people at such a high level that they would love to buy my product or service and recommend it to others?"

Before you can pick a social-media strategy, you have to think of your customer and what the value proposition is for them. Social media is a way to engage customers, not to give your business a 'shout out.'

Focus on executing to give maximum value to your customers. That means learning everything from financing to producing to marketing.

But why do only unimportant things?" asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them. "Think of all the trouble it saves," the man explained, and his face looked as if he'd be grinning an evil grin--if he could grin at all. "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren't for that dreadful magic staff, you'd never know how much time you were wasting.

So to the best we can, what we do is focus on creating value for others, and how do we do that? We do it by trying to produce products and services that our customers will value more than their alternatives, and not just their alternatives today, but what the alternatives will be in the future. We try to more efficiently use resources than our competitors, and constantly improve in that, and we try to do the best job we can in creating a safe environment, and environmental excellence, and constantly improve at that.

The customer is the most important part of the production line.

Money is a function of value creation. The more value you create for other people, the higher the sales of your organization.

Marketing, and the whole firm, should devote extraordinary endeavour towards delighting, keeping for ever and expanding the sales to the 20 per cent of customers who provide 80 per cent.

If you think in terms of topping, you're in the wrong business. You can't think that way.

If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.

You have to use your judgment. In cases like that, we say, 'let's be simple minded. We know this is a feature that's good for customers. Let's do it.

It is true thrift to use the best ingredients available and to waste nothing.

Excellence comes from human beings doing things of value that customers find memorable.

The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.