I don't look at business as a zero-sum game. I don't. I've never seen it play out that way in our industry, and I think you innovate and you add value, deliver value back to customers, and you get value back from the world.
Interpretation
Business can be a collaborative endeavor where value is created and shared, rather than a competition where one party's gain is another's loss.
This quote by Marc Benioff emphasizes a perspective on business that sees it as a space for innovation and value creation rather than a competitive zero-sum game. In his view, businesses succeed by delivering value to customers, which in turn generates value for the business itself, suggesting that collaboration and mutual benefit are key to success in the industry.
In practice
During a conference on entrepreneurship, one could quote this to emphasize the importance of creating value through collaboration.
Once you know what you want and what is important for you to achieve, also define the values associated with it. What is important? That is something a lot of entrepreneurs pass by too quickly. For us, the things that were important were, No. 1, customer success. Nothing is more important to us than making sure every customer is successful in our service.
I strongly believe the business of a business is to improve the world.
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
Although I loved working on technology - I've always been a computer geek at heart - my professors encouraged me to get a real-world job working with customers.
The only constant in the technology industry is change.
The antidote to inequality is equality. The question is how do you achieve equality? I believe that, for business, which is where I can speak, we have to shift from shareholder maximization to stakeholder maximization.
On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.
The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.
Owning a popular sports team is very different than any other type of business. They don't throw parades when Apple has the biggest quarter in corporate history. People don't call and email asking for anyone from the team to come visit their sick child. They don't cry as they request a jersey of their child's favorite player to be buried with them.
The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity
Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.
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