Quotes about business

When things go wrong, the standard management strategy is to decide who takes the blame. This should be an underling, as far down the chain as possible, but preferably with some visibility so people know management means business.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

People who instinctively establish a strong network of relationships have always created great businesses.

Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—’’we’’ entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.

Even people within systems don't often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving. "To make profits", most corporations would say, but that's just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. What is the point of the game? To grow, to increase market share, to bring the world (customers, suppliers, regulators) more and more under the control of the corporation, so that its operations becomes ever more shielded from uncertainty.

This artifice will drive them to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that exists for its own sake and assumes its own shape. But of course, nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume its own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic.

[an Ontario-based bus company] Trentway-Wagar was arguing that because carpooling used to be inconvenient, it should always be inconvenient, and if that inconvenience disappeared, then it should be reinserted by legal fiat. Curiously, an organization that commits to helping society manage a problem also commits itself to the preservation of that same problem, as its institutional existence hinges on society’s continued need for its management. Bus companies provide a critical service—public transportation—but they also commit themselves, as Trentway-Wagar did, to fending off competition from alternative ways of moving people from one place to another.

That’s how business works. There’s always somebody coming in on your blind side.

There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have everything they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything.

So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relationship in the technological world.

Marketing, and the whole firm, should devote extraordinary endeavour towards delighting, keeping for ever and expanding the sales to the 20 per cent of customers who provide 80 per cent.

Business strategy should not be a grand and sweeping overview. It should be more like an under view, a peek beneath the covers to look in great detail at what is going on.