Barry Sternlicht Quotes

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.

I definitely see a correlation between how many things a company gets right and how fast a company grows.

The wireless segment is approximately 50 percent of our business... we believe this is an industry-wide phenomenon and that we are, in fact, maintaining if not gaining market share.

I'm always thinking as an outsider, and I'm always mindful of whether a company can be impactful on a global basis. Frankly, I'm paranoid about anyone anywhere who could be a competitive threat.

It is the performance of the business that matters. It is hard enough to figure out the future of the business. Do not try to figure out the future of the country or the world; focus on the business.

When companies are successful or not successful, they almost immediately jump to the wrong conclusions about how they got there or why they got there.

My model is much deeper than looking after players. My model is understanding the industry, working within it.

Understanding how to compete better has really made a difference.

Visionary CEOs don't need someone else to demo the company's key products for them. They deeply understand products, and they have their own coherent and consistent vision of where the industry/business models and customers are today, and where they need to take the company.

We try to study our rivals so we know where to improve.

I study my competition for at least an hour a day. I get on the internet, look at what they doing, then I look at ways to defeat them.

The thing I preach constantly is do your research; build your knowledge base. Don't just go into business on a whim or a prayer - and don't think 'I'm an entrepreneur so I have to take risks'. Entrepreneurs don't take risks. They take calculated risks; only the good ones.

When leaders of a professional team perform a scan, they examine the trends dominating their customer demographics, education, government policy, and especially their competition.

You're only as good as your dumbest competitor.

I had the opportunity to go with some other teams. But I didn't consider those teams to be contenders, and I was right.

This is a business. Be smart. Choose wisely.

I've been looking at companies that are on a positive path vs. a negative path and I've come to use the language of sports, winning streaks and losing streaks.

Having spent two years at AOL, I would love to be able to go back to that industry knowing what I know, and I think I would be able to help the traditional media side to better understand what is coming at them, how to deal with it.

I don't keep up on a lot of the business trends.

Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year.

Businesswise, everything's been good.

In my world, historical revenue is the least interesting thing to consider in an acquisition strategy.

India is a large market where our focus will be to grow faster than the market and add few percentage points to our market share every year.

We don't go into a market without a chance of a 40 percent share and sustainable differentiation. We wouldn't get into wiring oil rigs if we didn't believe we could get 40 percent.

Our focus is to see that we are growing faster than the industry and, whichever product we launch, we do better than competition. We try and manage our operations better than competition. Essentially, we try to be better than what we were the previous year.