Mark V. Hurd Quotes

Making new products is an easy tap for a company in a recession.

An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It's always redefining its 'core business' in ways that open up new avenues for growth.

You need to run the company on an even keel, and you need to be thinking about the company long-term and how to drive your next innovation.

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

Unlike Marvel, we are not setting up redundant organizations for expertise that exists. We will track all DC properties to measure financial success.

Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business.

Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

We can reorient our products and business strategy because we are an agile organisation.

In business, you try to solve problems.

In a period of economic downturn, the overwhelming instinct is to pare back, cut costs, and lay off. If you do that, do so with your strategy in mind. The worst mistake is to cut across the board. Instead, reconnect and recommit to a clear strategy that will distinguish yourself from others.

The founder of Dell found ways of delivering Hewlett Packard's most profitable products for much lower prices but forgot to deliver their quality so within a few years had fallen behind again. Ideas need constant renewal. A great idea will never be perfect and will never work perfectly in all markets and all seasons.

Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.

What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.

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.

A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message.

Volkswagen must continue to attack and make good use of its opportunities.

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

To be successful in business, you have to be ruthless.

The state of the economy is not the issue when it comes to growing a business. The relevant questions are always: 'What business are you in? Furthermore, is it adapting to the times?'

My job is to make sure that as our customers' priorities change, as the environment changes, we shift that portfolio of products to meet them.

In the commercial world, you have this problem that the amount of research you can do in a company is based on how well your current business is going, whereas there actually should be an inverse relationship: when things are going worse, you should do more research.

As a CEO, you have to take the active action to force most of your resources to stand idle from time to time - or go bankrupt.