Joanne Woodward Quotes

Just as predatory animals follow a similar general design and behave in similar ways, so organizations, especially those in competition with one another, must follow certain design principles if they are to succeed and prevail.

You have got to get the strategy right; you have to get the operations right - lined up from R&D out to the field.

The primary asset of any business is its organization.

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

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

So in 2000, when we changed the business model and started really focusing on that triangle and putting the customer in the center, we decided we should hold off - we've done enough consolidation; we've got enough critical mass.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.

In many respects, we really are trying to not run the Social Office like a business, but we do have a strategy. We do have a mission. We are trying to standardize certain things so that our time is not spent on, you know, picking flowers or linens, that we've got standards.

There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

I think it's natural for any manager to want to grow his business. The question is at what rate, and in what direction, and in what format?

This is a business that is much easier planned than executed.

When the finance or marketing people run a company, innovation stops.

As the Executive Chairman of 'Breitbart News' with a long run in business and finance, I can tell you, it's hard to run a company that is infinitesimally smaller than Fox; it takes a steady and experienced hand.

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

If you get the product and technology right, then the rest usually falls into place.

And to do that not only for the war fighter, but also to help prepare the people in the acquisition, personnel and policy worlds who need to make adjustments in the department's business, which itself may take 10 or 15 years to accomplish.

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.

I think we have to notice that the business processes we use right now for thinking and planning and budgeting and strategy are all delivered on very tight agendas.

You can't run a €10 million business the way you run a €1 million business.

If you run a business, if you are responsible for a lot of people, you come to grips with the reality that you have to have discipline. You have to protect the enterprise in order to take care of the employees. So, therefore, you can't be wasteful. You can't squander things, or you jeopardize other people.

Sometimes, for businesses, competition can be inconvenient, because competition means that the race is never over, the game is never won. No matter how well you were doing in the past, there's always someone who are out there wanting to take your place. So the temptation to avoid competition is powerful. It's rooted in motives as old as Adam and Eve: in greed for yet more money, in fear of losing your position in the market and all the benefits it brings.

I think every company has its own unique approach to creating shareholder value.