Gerard Arpey Quotes

Substantial services growth is core to Boeing's strategy.

What I'm good at is making sure we have the best resources, the best talent, the best marketing, and the best access to distribution.

On 'Bar Rescue,' failure is not an option. I have to try to turn the business around.

Our economic model allows us to invest a disproportionate amount in our food costs. We have a very efficient system: customers go through a single line, the people who serve you are the ones who make the food, and our menu board is not cluttered.

No vision issue today is bigger than the question of efficiency versus some combination of innovation and customer service.

If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by a tenth of a cent, then you've got a terrible business. I've been in both, and I know the difference.

I tell each artist they have to grow toward a revenue stream.

Great execution is at least 10 times more important and a 100 times harder than a good idea.

Great companies are defined by their discipline and their understanding of who they are and who they are not.

Synergy is the driver. There are two levels of synergy: there are operating synergies, which, you know, you'd have to be stupid not to try to take advantage of, and then there are strategic synergies. In other words, in what positions you would be more sustainable, more long term, and so on.

Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.

The profitable part of the online business is very likely several years away. Entering the business because it's the hot topic of the day doesn't make a profitable business nor satisfied customers. That's why it will be a part of Nintendo's strategy, not the mainstay, as other companies are attempting to do. There still are too many barriers for any company to greatly depend on it.

Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back to the company.

I read annual reports of the company I'm looking at and I read the annual reports of the competitors - that is the main source of material.

Strategy is, above all else, the search for above average returns.

We have built a company with a business mix and operating system that will allow us to deliver record results in any foreseeable economic climate, ... We have just completed a very successful management transition and I've never been more confident about the company's future.

Operational effectiveness and strategy are both essential to superior performance.

Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise.

An executive cannot gradually dismiss details. Business is made up of details and I notice that the chief executive who dismisses them is quite likely to dismiss his business. Success is the sum of detail. It might perhaps be pleasing to imagine oneself beyond detail and engaged only in great things, but as I have often observed, if one attends only to great things and lets the little things pass the great things become little; that is, the business shrinks.

Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

The surest foundation of a manufacturing concern is quality. After that, and a long way after, comes cost.

Business is all about learning to balance the short-term, medium-term and long-term and I think it's when things are going well it covers up a lot of mistakes and bad decisions because you're growing so quickly.

The first set of questions to ask yourself when you're doing cost cutting is relatively straightforward, which is, you know, can you use the necessity of cost cutting as an opportunity to do pruning or trimming for projects that aren't being as successful? But, you know, frequently those are the easy ones. I mean, there's always some kind of social costs internal to the company, but that's the easy way of looking at the future.

I wanted the best for my company, I had to do what I did to succeed. Everyone was lowering their prices to beat there competition so I did the same I eventually beat my competition.

Because software is all about scale. The larger you are, the more profitable you are. If we sell twice as much as software, it doesn't cost us twice as much to build that software. So the more customers you have, the more scale you have. The larger you are, the more profitable you are.