Martin Winterkorn Quotes

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

In business, what do we do? We compete.

There is no resting place for an enterprise in a competitive economy.

Businesses will ultimately go where the markets and opportunities are.

My entire business model is to go on offense.

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.

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.

In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running, if you stand still, they will swallow you.

Sometimes, for businesses, competition can be inconvenient, because competition means that the race is never over, the game is never won. No matter how well you were doing in the past, there's always someone who are out there wanting to take your place. So the temptation to avoid competition is powerful. It's rooted in motives as old as Adam and Eve: in greed for yet more money, in fear of losing your position in the market and all the benefits it brings.

Healthy competition is very important in any industry. It keeps you on your toes and helps you grow.

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

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

It's not wise to limit firms' expansion projects. Let us only be limited by the market.

We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.

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.

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

If you change the rules of the market, you can be more successful than your competitors.

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.

We're looking to have the ability to come in and be able to capitalize on the marketing in order to grow the top-line. We basically leverage what has worked with our other successful acquisitions - investment in marketing, retention and student services.

I know how to make stuff happen, how to create wealth, create jobs, create investment.

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.

As I've said, in 2007, we're free to go and we'll just have to do what's best for the business.

If you want to stay in the business then you've got to be a bit shrewd, haven't you?

If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.