Nick > Nick's Quotes

“Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma with Award-Winning Harvard Business Review Article ?How Will You Measure Your Life??

“Probably the most daunting challenge in delivering growth is that if you fail once to deliver it, the odds that you ever will be able to deliver in the future are very low.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“In 1961, before the container was in international use, ocean freight costs alone accounted for 12 percent of the value of U.S. exports and 10 percent of the value of U.S. imports.”
― Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

“The foundation of success in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune; it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick.”
― P.T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting: Golden Rules for Making Money

“WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. The old proverb is full of truth and meaning, "Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well." Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business. Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.”
― P.T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting: Golden Rules for Making Money

“If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower.”
― Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

“Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“39 percent of stocks had a negative total return. (Two out of every five stocks are money-losing investments.)”
― John Del Vecchio, What's Behind the Numbers?: A Guide to Exposing Financial Chicanery and Avoiding Huge Losses in Your Portfolio

“The best-performing 2,000 stocks—25 percent—accounted for all the gains. The worst performing 6,000—75 percent—collectively had a total return of 0 percent.”
― John Del Vecchio, What's Behind the Numbers?: A Guide to Exposing Financial Chicanery and Avoiding Huge Losses in Your Portfolio

“Identifying disruptive footholds means connecting with specific jobs that people—your future customers—are trying to get done in their lives.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“when people encounter a significant threat, a response called “threat rigidity” sets in. The instinct of threat rigidity is to cease being flexible and to become “command and control” oriented—to focus everything on countering the threat in order to survive.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

“The first customer ship date does not mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them.”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Build it and they will come,” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer.”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“the principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“the rate of population growth observed from 1700 to 2012—0.8 percent per year—were to continue for the next three centuries, the world’s population would be on the order of 70 billion in 2300.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“In 1972, about 10 cents out of every retail dollar was spent with Sears.”
― Alan Wurtzel, Good to Great to Gone: The 60 Year Rise and Fall of Circuit City