Edwin Catmull Quotes

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

People must be realistic when evaluating their business.

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

I've really thought a lot about why other companies fail or succeed. I had to be a student of failure and find out why things went off the rails. I did that at a fairly deep level, and it's still something I do.

I didn't generate my success by being a prognosticator. I developed my reputation building our businesses by building great businesses and making them more efficient.

I definitely see a correlation between how many things a company gets right and how fast a company grows.

Every time we bring someone in we ensure that they are a strategic thinker, but even more important that they understand that if the products aren't successful and the products don't sell that there won't be anything to strategize about.

Enterprises that depend on many rarely succeed.

The successful entrepreneurs on the free market will be the ones most adept at anticipating future business conditions. Yet, the forecasting can never be perfect, and entrepreneurs will continue to differ in the success of their judgments. If this were not so, no profits or losses would ever be made in business.

I've always maintained the basic business principles of keeping it simple, doing your homework, hard work, and common sense.

If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management.

People follow proven formulas in any business.

Most businesses fail because they want the right things but measure the wrong things, and they get the wrong results.

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

You have to make a decision whether it's a new product or you integrate it with an existing product. It takes time to work these things out.

When I first got into business, I made a lot of bad decisions.

You make the right decision for the long run. You manage for the long run, and you continue to move to higher value. That's what I think my job is.

All entrepreneurs make decisions. Some will go right, and some will not go that right.

If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business.

I have almost no interest in quarterly reports. Running a business or investing in a business based on quarterly earnings doesn't make any sense at all to me.

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

You just can't get too focused on worrying about what's going to happen in the next quarter. You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.

When you're talking about capital and financial things, which I certainly pay a lot of attention to, I base those decisions on one question that I typically ask myself, which is 'Does it help us to build a better company?'

It's important to have a really clear strategy so when you are in business, you only have to make micro-strategy changes.

I don't keep up on a lot of the business trends.