Thomas Keller Quotes

We are really very lucky to have so many fantastic brands. But to grow them we should not be too much in a hurry. They are growing fast, but they have to grow accordingly to the market and to the capacity we have to deliver good products.

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.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

The purpose of business is to make a reasonable return by making products and services that people want and value. If you are not, you are wasting resources.

We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.

Profitability comes from loyalty, productivity, and having a character base from which to work.

It's easier to build a business around a first-class product, even if it's a more expensive product to produce.

You may grow very quickly the first two years and then watch the business decline, unless you really start selling product at any price range with various degrees of quality.

This industry is 90 percent business, 10 percent talent.

In the U.S., we didn't have scale, and without scale, it's difficult to operate.

Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources, they're going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems.

A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message.

There's no reason for Gillette to be world class on the web, but there's every reason for Gillette to be world class in producing billions of high powered razor blades at low cost.

There is no doubt that the recognition by economists of the importance of the role of the firm in the functioning of the economy will prompt them to investigate its activities more closely.

I'm always a fan of good business moves.

One of the most horrible wastes of capital you see is the duplication of the effort by the car manufacturers to do things that appear to be different from the other guy.

Our focus is to see that we are growing faster than the industry and, whichever product we launch, we do better than competition. We try and manage our operations better than competition. Essentially, we try to be better than what we were the previous year.

Our line of business structure has served us very well in the past, when customer segments and product requirements were very distinct.

If you put on your business hat, you can't maintain competitiveness by staying at a competitive disadvantage. I mean, you just can't. The odds are just not in your favor.

For us, just serving the market in the US and the UK, we can barely make the math work on an interesting business. My sense is that our clones and copycats are very manual. If they make it work, then congratulations to them!

The biggest challenge to thriving in the marketplace is identifying the strategic moves that will keep us ahead of the competition.

The individual Siemens businesses must be able to keep up with the specialists in the industry and be at least as good as their strongest competitors.

I want to make thorough steps to create a system that will spur industry competition.

You have to have a unique product that Amazon just can't source. It's all about the product. Why is it important? Why is it different? Amazon are not merchants. They are technology platform guys.

In business, what do we do? We compete.