Corporate Survival Quotes

If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will.

Over the very long term, history shows that the chances of any business surviving in a manner agreeable to a company's owners are slim at best.

It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.

We all know the mortality of companies is less than human beings.

I experienced the year 2000 dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis, and it almost wiped out the company.

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.

Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation. You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs’] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren’t good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around.

Corporations understand the value of security because the leakage of their competitive information could be the end of the corporation.

The organization that can't communicate can't change, and the corporation that can't change is dead.

No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn't.

We approached Yahoo and Jerry Yang and said that Hadoop is going to continue to be popular, and as it does, more and more of your team is going to get poached by other companies and come under pressure to leave. This way, you can control your own fate and destiny.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

I think businesses live longer that are on the stock market.

I'm challenging the assumption that you need to be a dog-eat-dog person to survive in a corporate environment.

When sustainability is viewed as being a matter of survival for your business, I believe you can create massive change.

Simply surviving in this business is a feat.

Then, in the 1980's, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue . . . The New York Times captured the new corporate order succinctly in 1987, reporting that... 'All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter'.

It is in the long run that the corporation lives.

If you look at the average age of a company on the Dow Jones index, it's something like 35 years or younger. In other words... success is no indication of longevity.

Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.

So if I die, somebody else from the corporation will take over the business.

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

Sometimes your worst competitors are the ones which are dying because they do stupid things.

I had come out of retirement into a very difficult situation with the PeopleSoft takeover, got through it, and was having a good time, frankly. We just ran out of runway at PeopleSoft. Had we had another year, maybe two years, I think we would have made it.

We must start with the reality that corporations cannot guarantee anyone a lifetime job any more than corporations have a guarantee of immortality.