Michael Porter Quotes

We're not trying to be Amazon, all things to all people.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.

We have to make sure, at Apple, that we stay true to focus, laser focus - we know we can only do great things a few times, only on a few products.

Strategy is choice. Strategy means saying no to certain kinds of things.

Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principle of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.... Our motto seems to be, "Let's do a little bit of everything."

The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right - but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.

You can't do everything. You can't do health and forestry and agriculture. You've got to focus and do one or the other.

Our problem wasn’t that it blew up and was impossible to scale, but there were some bad choices made. One of the biggest lessons time after time was to focus. Do fewer things.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing. This focus and intensity helps to eliminate wasted effort and distractions. Most companies die from indigestion rather than starvation, i.e., companies suffer from doing too many things at the same time rather than doing too few things very well.

One skill of a great entrepreneur is to get a whole complicated discussion and then say, 'We're going to do this one and we're only going to do this one'. Managers are good at prioritizing. Entrepreneurs know what is the one thing.

Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

I could go insane if I obsessed over every little detail of all of my companies. My management philosophy is to pay attention to the vital few and ignore the trivial many.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

Prioritization sounds like such a simple thing, but true prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can't rationalize the answer, and you can't attach the one thing to some other things. It's just the one thing.

My basic strategy is to stick to my core business and to my area of expertise.

My rule is, if you want to build something that does all things for all people, it's not going to work real well.

That's a big part of the process: making the right choice from the beginning. Not getting distracted by shiny things.

Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that's important - speed.

Need always plays into your decisions more as the draft unfolds.

When you're building a business, you want to focus and deliver excellence at what you do. This simply cannot be done when you are launching multiple ventures, dozens of new products, and selling everywhere and anywhere at the same time.

You have to ruthlessly prioritize.

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose.....It's not just saying yes to the right products, it's saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as the other ones.