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Most Recent Business Quotations

It has been proven time and again that single organizations cannot really maintain a focus on being extremely cost efficient, innovative, and customer centric simultaneously. Acknowledging this implies organizing in teams that are small enough to have a single core objective, which defines their culture and ways of working. 

It’s important to distinguish between:

  • Delivery teams. These manage specific assets and resources via focused organizational and leadership
… [ Read more ]
— Johan C. Aurik, Gillis Jonk

Authors: Gillis Jonk, Johan C. Aurik | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The last century of organization design can be summarized as a mostly incomplete struggle to escape the productivity stronghold and adapt to doing everything equally well, from imagining future demand opportunities to delivering optimum value—plus everything in between.
— Johan C. Aurik, Gillis Jonk

Authors: Gillis Jonk, Johan C. Aurik | Source: Kearney | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Ronald Coase theorized that as transaction costs come down, so does the need for companies to keep all parts of their value chains in-house. Time has proven Coase right several times over: every company today not only outsources, insources, partners, platforms, co-brands, co-develops, co-innovates, and licenses like there is no tomorrow, every technology company and start-up aspires to provide its offerings on-demand or as-a-service.

As a result, … [ Read more ]
— Johan C. Aurik, Gillis Jonk

Authors: Gillis Jonk, Johan C. Aurik | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Product-market fit is one of the most important, yet elusive, concepts in company building. It’s not a clear metric you can measure or a milestone you can easily check off your to-do list. I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from "pushing" your product on people to them "pulling" it out of your hands. But … [ Read more ]
— Todd Jackson

Author: Todd Jackson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The most ancient and still crucial element of strategy is focus. In military terms, it is the concentration of force on an opponent’s weakness. More generally, it is the coordinated application of resources and effort to an important yet addressable challenge. Strategic focus means bringing sources of power to bear on a selected target. If the power is weak, nothing happens. If it is strong … [ Read more ]
— Richard P. Rumelt

Author: Richard Rumelt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy

Most Popular Business Quotations

In principle, patents open up innovations in two ways. First, they confer only temporary rights; once patents expire or are abandoned, the intellectual property they are designed to protect passes into the public domain. Second, they require the details of the invention to be disclosed so they can be replicated. This permits follow-on innovation, which is essential for industrial progress. More recently, as the patent system … [ Read more ]
— The Economist

As for the genius of innovation, clearly the one percent spark of inspiration is nurtured by a positive culture. But the 99 percent perspiration ingredient comes from employees who love what they do, as well as where they do it, and who invest in that Holy Grail of productivity called “discretionary … [ Read more ]
— Stephanie Quappe, David Samso Aparici, Jon Warshawsky

Money never comes first in self-expression of any kind.
— William J. Reilly

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no … [ Read more ]
— Theodore Roosevelt

The uncomfortable fact for many green marketers--and targets of that marketing--is that genuinely going green would mean giving up most of the products and services that clutter our consumer culture. It would mean simplifying, valuing time and people over stuff. How can most products avoid the sin of the hidden trade-off? With a simple label: "You don't really need this."
— David Roberts

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