Michael Porter Quotes

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

The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish.

Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming.

The way deals are done, every idea is looked at 50 different ways. Now, the market continues to change all the time. And we are always looking at everything in evaluating how it fits with our strategy.

I've said it for four decades - work 'on' your business, not just 'in' your business!

You have to have a business model you believe in and like.

We don't want to go starting completely separate businesses that do nothing for our user base.

Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.

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.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

I think the biggest myth entrepreneurs have is that the growth and performance of their startups depends more on their entrepreneurial talent than on the businesses they choose.

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

The hype that accompanied the promotion of successive strategic fashions exaggerated the importance of the enlightened manager and played down the importance of chance and circumstance in explaining success.

I'm always a fan of good business moves.

In any competitive environment, whether you're in sales or marketing or whatever it is, you have to know your competition, understand who they are, do intelligent analysis on them and then you have to know yourself - who you are and what you're capable of doing.

The key to our business, it's a lot of research.

My job is to make sure that as our customers' priorities change, as the environment changes, we shift that portfolio of products to meet them.

Business is the systematic playing of games.

In the commercial world, you have this problem that the amount of research you can do in a company is based on how well your current business is going, whereas there actually should be an inverse relationship: when things are going worse, you should do more research.

Businesses will ultimately go where the markets and opportunities are.

Successful strategic vision lay in the fact that we visualized the retail business to be much bigger, ahead of what others thought it to be.

Giving up your core business in search of a phantom audience is not wise.

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

Sometimes, the startup game works in your favor just because you got in at the right time and right environment. Other times, you're a little too late entering an already crowded space. But startups with strong fundamentals withstand external conditions and come out ahead in good or bad times.

I've always prided myself on doing what really was best for business.