Management Quotes

PowerPoint has a dark side. It squeezes ideas into a preconceived format, organizing and condensing not only your material but—inevitably, it seems—your way of thinking about and looking at that material. A complicated, nuanced issue invariably is reduced to headings and bullets. And if that doesn’t stultify your thinking about the subject, it may have that effect on your audience—which is at the mercy of your presentation.
— Julia Keller

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Communication

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that’s pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren’t studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

There’s nothing wrong with these tendencies. Ultimately, we’re all social beings, and without one another to rely on, life would be not only intolerable but meaningless. Yet our mutual dependence has unexpected consequences, one of which is that if people do not make decisions independently — if even in part they like things because other people like them — then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually impossible, no matter how much you know about individual tastes.

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory.
— Duncan J. Watts

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Customer Related and Marketing

Happiness rarely triggers commerce. Unhappiness often does.

Purchases are triggered by dissatisfaction with the way things are. We purchase when we have a need, a desire, an itch to scratch. We want to change our condition, our surroundings, our state of mind. We buy because we are dissatisfied…

…To increase your sales volume, you must identify the dissatisfaction that lurks in the heart of your customer. And then you must shine your flashlight of words into that darkness…
— Roy Williams

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Marketing and Sales

If you gave away every idea you ever had, people would still step up to ask you to help them, or do it for them. The same can’t be said if you don’t share with them at all. …As our friend Sean D’Souza likes to say, “Give the ideas. Sell the system.”
— Bryan Eisenberg

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Competition and Information

Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.
— Scott Berkun

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Creativity and Innovation

An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occurred to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this—and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories.
— Scott Berkun

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Creativity and Innovation

Success is like food. It’s all a function of preparation.
— Jeff Ruby

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Success

Fame can be a vapor, money has wings, popularity can be an accident. The only thing lasting in life is character.
— Jeff Ruby

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Character

Mere work ethic is not enough. The hardened criminal exhibits an excellent work ethic. What is needed is a work ethic conditioned by ethics in work.
— M.P. Bhattathiri

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Ethics and Work

There is no such thing as a “space”.

There is such a thing as a market — that’s a group of people who will directly or indirectly pay money for something.

There is such a thing as a product — that’s an offering of a new kind of good or service that is brought to a market.

There is such a thing as a company — that’s an organized business entity that brings a product to a market.

But there is no such thing as a “space”.

And, as far as startups are concerned, there is no such thing as Web 2.0.

What happens when startups start getting referred to as “Web 2.0 startups” — or for that matter, “B2B startups” or “mobile startups” or “pen computing startups” — or as being in the Web 2.0/B2B/mobile/pen computing “space” — is that trends are getting mistaken for markets and products.

You can’t build a company based on a trend.

Trends are obvious, and there’s no startup opportunity in the obvious.

It frankly doesn’t really matter which trends, or design patterns, you incorporate into your product.

If the product is compelling to the market, it will succeed.

If the product is not compelling to the market, it will fail.

It’s not much more complicated than that.
— Marc Andreessen

No Comments » Posted by Administrator / Entrepreneurship and Miscellaneous