Ronald Coase Quotes

Companies that grow for the sake of growth or that expand into areas outside their core business strategy often stumble. On the other hand, companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.

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.

If guys try to make a bigger company for the sake of size, they don't create value in most cases.

Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.

Roughly speaking, when you are dealing with business firms operating in a competitive system, you can assume that they're going to act rationally. Why? Because someone in a firm who buys things at $10 and sells them for $8.00 isn't going to last very long in that firm.

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.

Our job is to find out what's the next thing that is going to be advantageous to us and contribute to winning.

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

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

The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

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

We are really very lucky to have so many fantastic brands. But to grow them we should not be too much in a hurry. They are growing fast, but they have to grow accordingly to the market and to the capacity we have to deliver good products.

One likes at the point of production to realize the maximum value, and diamond producers are no different.

Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.

Good household decision-making often relies on thinking about your household like a firm.

In the 1950s, I proposed the survivor method of determining the efficient sizes of enterprises, and worked on delivered price systems, vertical integration, and similar topics.

As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance?

Any manager can do well in an expanding market.

Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming.

Let's face it: if you and I have the same capabilities, the same energy, the same staff, if the only thing that's different between you and me is the products we can get, and I can get a better product than you, I'm going to be a better chef.

Every company has to identify what I call its strategic resources, and make sure that it grabs as much of its strategic resources as possible.

Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing.

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

Our entire team is focused on managing this company for value - fixing or eliminating those operations that lessen value and expanding or adding those that enhance value.