44 Posts Found

All big ideas share at least one of three business objectives: improved efficiency, greater effectiveness, or innovations in products or processes. In a way, it’s an exhaustive set of possibilities. You do things right, you do the right thing, or you do something new.

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Business Rules, Management

It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance–especially not to the future of the business and to its success…What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: 800-CEO-READ (8CR) | Subjects: Business Rules, Customer Related

Organizations do four things – they find, they keep, they tranform and they distribute. Many concentrate on one thing or another, although virtually all organizations do all four. And they do them in all kinds of ways (sometimes in linear sequences, called chains, often around central cores, called hubs, and increasingly in interactive networks, called webs). Which one is used makes a big difference in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Business Rules, Organizational Behavior

The modern organization is a destabilizer. It must be organized for innovation and innovation, as the great Austro-American economist Joseph Schumpeter said, is “creative destruction.” And it must be organized for the systematic abandonment of whatever is established, customary, familiar, and comfortable, whether that is a product, service, or process; a set of skills; human and social relationships; or the organization itself. In short, it … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Business Rules, Organizational Behavior

There are at least a dozen major design variables in a business. How you go to market, which competencies you use, how you put together your value web, what is your core mission, where do you look for differentiation, and so on. And most people Don’t see those as design variables after a while. They just start accepting them for what they are. …I’m trying … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Business Plans, Business Rules

Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit… then the business must die as well, for it no longer has a reason for existence.

Content: Quotation | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Business Rules, Mission

Saying that a company’s purpose is to maximize profits is like saying that man exists in order to breathe. The fact that a man cannot live without breathing is one thing, but the ultimate purpose to which all man’s energies must be directed is quite another. Similarly, it is one thing to say that a company cannot survive without a certain minimum of profits, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Miguel Ángel Ariño | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Business Rules, Mission

I think the idea is that one has, among other responsibilities, the responsibility to try to increase shareholder value. But when you say “maximize,” you’re now saying it’s my priority at the cost of all others. And that’s what I will not acknowledge — any more than I would go the other way and say my purpose is to maximize the happiness of my employees. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Graziadio Business Report | Subjects: Business Rules, Miscellaneous

The game of value capture is no longer won by finding and protecting a defensible position: It’s won by developing a business system that’s quicker and better at using information, and adapting the system as the industry evolves.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Business Rules, Strategy

Although I invented the term “profit center” 40 years ago – one of my lesser contributions – a subsidiary of a division is not a profit center, but a cost center. The only profit center is the customer. Until the customer has paid his bill, there are only costs, and until the customer has come back with a repeat order there is no customer.

Content: Quotation | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Business Rules, Customer Related

Corporations are instruments designed to organize people and resources. Even though people assume corporations are primarily economic instruments, the purposes of the corporation actually get defined and worked out differently in different countries and in different historical periods. Inherent in the corporate form itself is not a single purpose. Rather, it is up to members of society to determine the purposes of the corporation. That … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Business Rules, Miscellaneous

The 20th-century company was characterized by a separation of conceptualization and execution; a small group of people-the “brains”-developed a plan, and a large group of people-the hired “hands”-carried it out. That distinction is obsolete in the information economy.

Content: Quotation | Source: Optimize Magazine | Subjects: Business Rules, Economics

The media have been mining human attention – the ultimate finite resource – for centuries. Traditionally, they have done so in two ways: charging for access and selling impressions. Charging for access is straightforward. It involves offering people something fun or valuable enough to do with their spare attention that they’ll pay for it. Selling impressions involves carving out small slices of the attention that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Business 2.0 | Subjects: Business Rules, Marketing / Sales

Either Do Something Very Beautiful or Very Useful
– former mission on the walls of Bell Labs (pre-divestiture)

Content: Quotation | Source: CGE&Y Center for Business Innovation (CBI) | Subjects: Business Rules, Vision

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

Content: Quotation | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Business Rules, Customer Related

A society that has no rules is abhorrent, but a society that only stays within the letter of the law is not much better.

Content: Quotation | Source: scotsman.com | Subjects: Business Rules, Wisdom

We’ve long believed that when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when.

Content: Quotation | Source: GE’s 2000 annual report | Subjects: Business Rules, Change Management

There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Business Rules, Capitalism

Creating value that can be captured is the essence of business.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Business Rules

My notion is that an organization is really a factory for producing new ideas and for linking those ideas with resources – human resources, financial resources, knowledge resources, infrastructure resources – in an effort to create value.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Business Rules