John T. Chambers Quotes

You've got to keep reinventing. You'll have new competitors. You'll have new customers all around you.

To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.

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.

It's very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.

No matter what business you're in, you can't run in place or someone will pass you by. It doesn't matter how many games you've won.

Any of our businesses will not exist in the form that is today, will not exist in the same form one year later, two years later... We have to worry about the disruptions in the business models and the practices.

Since I became CEO, 87 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 are off the list. What that says is that companies that don't reinvent themselves will be left behind. I also think that's true of people. And I think it's true of countries.

You either innovate or you become defunct.

The opportunity ahead for Microsoft is vast, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster, and continue to transform.

In any business, you have to evolve.

I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn't.

Even when early innovations start to succeed, it is not uncommon to see growing businesses sabotaged for threatening the status quo.

In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running, if you stand still, they will swallow you.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

The second you get set in your ways is the second a newer, fresher, more innovative company is going to come in and take your market share.

For every company that sees the value of their capital go up, there's another company that has been disrupted, and the value of their capital gets marked down because it's not going to compete in the same way.

I'm not going to be the one who turns out the last lights of the last conglomerate. So we need to reinvent ourselves all the time.

Businesses that don't evolve are businesses that die.

No company has a permanent consumer franchise. No one has the only game in town. The never-ending cycle of destruction and change inherent in a capitalist economy always provides new opportunities for those with determination, goals and concentration.

Any company has got to reinvent itself again and again.

The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.

Disruption is continuously afoot in every industry, but especially in autos. It is how Toyota, Nissan and Honda bloodied Detroit: They did not start their attack with Lexus, Infiniti and Acura, but with low-end subcompact models branded Corona, Datsun and CVCC.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.