Company Decline Quotes

When I came back I had to realize that IC was not in a very good shape - all the much money that we had because of the huge Ideal success, was gone. I was very upset.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

Atari is a very sad story.

There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.

Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could - I'm searching for the right word - could, could die.

John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place which was making great computers for people to use.

The MS really started going downhill in 1990.

The bigger the headquarters the more decadent the company.

Great companies have been reduced by hiring executives that don't work out.

The time of old-fashioned conglomerates is over. They are definitely not going to survive.

To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.

Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.

If something happened, like engineers starting to quit, things would go downhill fast.

When I arrived at Campbell on January 8, 2001, the company had lost half its market value in the prior year. They had to cut costs to the point where they were literally taking the chicken out of chicken noodle soup and the product was no longer competitive.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.