Business Adaptation Quotes

If you ask the average guy on the street to name five companies that have truly transformed themselves over the few decades, Hewlett-Packard would be on everybody's list. You'd also put on this list GE and Johnson & Johnson.

That is the key challenge facing management today; change is the only constant.

I'm the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.

The reality of life is, if you have a bagel shop and everybody is pouring into the doughnut shop across the street, if you want to stay in business, you start selling doughnuts.

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.

The world is changing, but so is Microsoft.

I think there are certain business matters which we must now conduct differently than we used to.

I have seen American determination in people like Debbi Sommers. She runs a furniture rental business for conventions in Las Vegas. When 9/11 hit, and again, when the recession tanked the conventions business, she didn't give up, close down, or lay off her people. She taught them not just to rent furniture, but also to manufacture it.

Last-mile efficiencies is a big trend. It's something that consumers have demonstrated that they want and existing businesses are trying to figure out and new businesses are rising up to.

It became obvious to me that if Abril was to consider itself a communications group, it could not remain indefinitely in paper and ink.

Your biggest fear is the transition from football to business. You feel inferior at the beginning. You don't have the knowledge to compete. But once you start focusing and understanding, then you start relating to things.

YouTube began as a failed video-dating site. Twitter was a failed music service. In each case, the founders continued to try new concepts when their big ideas failed. They often worked around the clock to try to overcome their failure before all their capital was spent. Speed to fail gives a startup more runway to pivot and ultimately succeed.

Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.

Just like any business is a living, breathing thing, an entrepreneur has to be able to adapt over time.

To survive you have to withstand the changes in the business. This business has gone through so many changes since I was young and now it is on to something else. It is all weird today, for me, because I am from the old times. You just have to keep adapting. Isn't that Darwinism? The creature that adapts to its environment survives.

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service.

Yahoo was Jerry Yang's baby. He did a great job creating the baby. Unfortunately, some of the key executives after the foundation of the company couldn't keep up with the technology innovation of the industry. They thought that Yahoo should become a media company.

One of our most difficult realizations was that - in the course of two years - a connecting hub in St. Louis had gone from something we thought we needed to something we could no longer afford.

What works in the States doesn't easily translate to the Korean market.

A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.

At Amazon, we were not working with the e-commerce division but with the Web services team. We started Flipkart completely from scrap. Moreover, the whole shopping behaviour and infrastructure challenges in the Indian market were different from that in the U.S. and European markets.

You cannot stick with the same media strategy forever any more than you can stick with the same football tactics forever.

When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change.

In business, when you fail at something, when something doesn't work, you say okay, we've learned that that's not a path to go down.

There will be two types of businesses in the next 5 years, those that are on the Internet, and those that are out of business