Business Agility Quotes

A company needs to have good business reflexes, to be able to marshal its forces in a crisis or in response to any unplanned event.

In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.

We recognize the need to adapt to a changing competitive environment.

The biggest fear that I see is that we will be left behind. We are a very slow industry; for us to make a decision takes forever. Take Tesla: Elon moves at the speed of a rocket.

You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.

Adaptability and constant innovation is key to the survival of any company operating in a competitive market.

If an acquisition can speed a process or fill a gap, we'll jump right to that. It's about timing, need... it's not necessarily an algorithm.

Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don't need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision - a way to be more successful - they have to remain nimble enough to take it.

I take a lean-startup approach: creating agile, interdisciplinary teams that get the minimum viable product to market as soon as possible. It's my job to be entrepreneur-in-residence, an internal change agent.

Executives need ample flexibility to respond to the market. That means both reducing costs and increasing innovation.

Take calculated risks. Act boldly and thoughtfully. Be an agile company.

A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it's harder to turn quickly.

Your job as CEO is to be the fastest person of the company.

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.

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

How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.

The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.

Candidly, when you go back to '07 or '08, it was hard to sell cloud. We started out by focusing on large enterprises on day one. Everybody thought cloud was for SMBs (small and mid-size businesses), but we made the leap that it was going to be for large enterprises, that they were going to replace their core systems.

That's how we're going to stay innovative. We're going to continue to attract entrepreneurs who say, 'I found an idea, and I can go to Google and have a demo in a month and be launched in six.'

So companies have to be very schizophrenic. On one hand, they have to maintain continuity of strategy. But they also have to be good at continuously improving.

Whether you lead an early-stage startup or a well-established company, it is critical to challenge yourself and your team to prepare for the next disruptive force - be it a shift in the market, a new consumer trend, or a competing innovation.

Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.

Almost every customer that I talk to is talking about how they're using APIs, and what a step function they are for their business.

Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.

Small businesses are more nimble and innovative than large corporations, and as a result are much more likely to develop the breakthrough ideas we need for global competitiveness.