Billy Beane Quotes

Any company has got to reinvent itself again and again.

Just like any business is a living, breathing thing, an entrepreneur has to be able to adapt over time.

There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.

An open-minded person running a business might catch a problem faster than a closed-minded person. And when they identify a problem, they can fix it much faster.

An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It's always redefining its 'core business' in ways that open up new avenues for growth.

In any business, you have to evolve.

Founders go wrong when they start to believe their business plan will materialize as written. I advise entrepreneurs to burn their business plan - it's simply too dangerous to the health of your business.

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.

You must always be able to predict what's next and then have the flexibility to evolve.

Nobody has a crystal ball, and part of evolving a business plan is to say, 'I might have said we're going left, but I see the opportunity and we're going right.'

You have to be very fast-thinking, creative, and mobile. It is key to making a business move.

In our experience, what we have found is the rare commodity is a good management team. And good management teams manage through good and bad cycles and manage to grow their business over a long period of time.

We need to build change in to our systems and let these systems evolve as circumstances change. Change is inevitable, but we need to do a better job of dealing with it, because when we start building huge gleaming monoliths, I think we start getting into trouble.

An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Moving with the times is an important idea for strategy today.

When you are running a business, there is a constant need to reinvent oneself. One should have the foresight to stay ahead in times of rapid change and rid ourselves of stickiness in any form in the business.

For organisations, flexibility is a must to cope with fluctuations in demand and remain competitive, and people must be able to develop adaptable attitudes to quickly embrace evolving business conditions, new business opportunities, and shifting strategies.

My job is called adaptation. It's always about adapting to new situations, but the core team is going to be the same.

One of the difficult things in a high-growth company is that, even with the best intentions, the company moves so fast, and growth happens so regularly. When you move at that rate, you have to be willing to change, and you have to be willing to take advice.

You need to be ready, to adapt quickly and learn fast.

Focus on long term success but be willing to make short term adjustments to get there

Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur.

The virtue of small-to-midsize companies is that they tend to be more flexible and it is easier to experiment with new ways of working. So just try to tackle one problem you're really struggling with, together with your team. Get started and see what happens. Chances are you will be happy with the outcome.

The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.

Preserve the core, and let the rest flux. In their wonderful bestseller Built to Last, authors James Collins and Jerry Porras make a convincing argument that long-lived companies are able to thrive 50 years or more by retaining a very small heart of unchanging values, and then stimulating progress in everything else. At times "everything" includes changing the business the company operates in, migrating, say, from mining to insurance. Outside the core of values, nothing should be exempt from flux. Nothing.