Quotes about Business

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.

Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.

With few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms' managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.

This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography—but successful growth companies optimize around the job.

The leading firms in the established technology remain financially strong until the disruptive technology is, in fact, in the midst of their mainstream market.

If history is any guide, companies that keep disruptive technologies bottled up in their labs, working to improve them until they suit mainstream markets, will not be nearly as successful as firms that find markets that embrace the attributes of disruptive technologies as they initially stand.

They are always motivated to go up-market, and almost never motivated to defend the new or low-end markets that the disruptors find attractive. We call this phenomenon asymmetric motivation. It is the core of the innovator's dilemma, and the beginning of the innovator's solution.

In a small, independent organization, these small wins will generate energy and enthusiasm. In the mainstream, they would generate skepticism about whether we should even be in the business. I want my organization's customers to answer the question of whether we should be in the business. I don't want to spend my precious managerial energy constantly defending our existence to efficiency analysts in the mainstream.

they reached as far upmarket as they could in each new product generation, until their drives packed the capacity to appeal to the value networks above them. It is this upward mobility that makes disruptive technologies so dangerous to established firms—and so attractive to entrants.

Companies make attractive money when they solve the hardest problems.

In dealing with disruptive technologies leading to new markets, however, market researchers and business planners have consistently dismal records.