7 Powers Quotes

“However, most invention is merely a manifestation of operational excellence and thus not immune to the arbitraging actions of competition.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“Steve Jobs’ remark: A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“Planning rarely creates Power. It may meaningfully boost Power once you have established it, but if Power does not yet exist, you can’t rely on planning. Instead”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“Branding. Over an extensive period of time, you make the consistent creative choices which foster in the customer’s mind an affinity that goes beyond the product’s objective attributes.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“action is the first principle of strategy,”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“For any business person, “‘Me too’ won’t do” feels right intuitively. Action, creation, risk—these lie at the root of invention.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“Competitors can easily mimic the improvements yielded by operational excellence, eventually arbitraging out the value to the business.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“We didn’t understand this bigger picture thing. All of our questions were focused on the floor, the assembly plant, what’s happening on the line. That’s not the real issue. The issue is how do you support that system with all the other functions that have to take place in the organization?”67”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“For Branding Power derived from uncertainty reduction, the customer’s higher willingness to pay is driven by high perceived costs of uncertainty relative to the cost of the good. Such products tend to be those associated with bad tail events: safety, medicine, food, transport, etc.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“Branding definition: The durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“A strong brand can only be created over a lengthy period of reinforcing actions (hysteresis), which itself serves as the key Barrier.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“The only bet worthwhile for a challenger is one in which even if the incumbent plays its best game, it can be taken off the board.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“This allows me to define Counter-Positioning: A newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“back to Buffett’s observation: “When a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, the reputation of the business remains intact.”25”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“If one supposes Network Economies then the strategy imperative is to scale much faster than anyone else—if another firm gets to the tipping point before you, then the game is over.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“strategy: a route to continuing Power in significant markets”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“As I had learned over my years as a business person, strategy is an unusual beast. Most of my time and that of everyone else at Netflix must be spent achieving superb execution. Fail at this, and you will surely stumble. Sadly, though, such execution alone will not ensure success. If you don’t get your strategy right, you are at risk.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“to assess which journeys are worth taking, you must first understand which destinations are desirable.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“The saga of Netflix’s ascent exemplifies intelligent adaptation over an extended period in the face of daunting uncertainty. The terrain of entrepreneurs, not planners.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“Power, the potential to realize persistent differential returns, is the key to value creation. Power is created if a business attribute is simultaneously: Superior—improves free cash flow Significant—the cash flow improvement must be material Sustainable—the improvement must be largely immune to competitive arbitrage”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“This disconnect might tempt you to reject Statics as a means of understanding Dynamics, but that would be folly. In a prescient article of two decades ago, Professor Porter saw past this error to the underlying premise that inspired my approach: A body of theory which links firm characteristics to market outcomes must provide the foundation for any fully dynamic theory of strategy. Otherwise dynamic processes that result in superior performance cannot be discriminated from those that create market positions or company skills that are worthless.87 In other words, to assess which journeys are worth taking, you must first understand which destinations are desirable. Fortunately the 7 Powers does exactly that: it maps the only seven worthwhile destinations. Accordingly, we can look back to my”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“Suppose a company has a significant scale advantage in a Scale Economies business. Smaller firms would spot this advantage, and their first impulse might be to pick up market share, thus improving their relative cost position and erasing some of this disadvantage while improving their bottom line. To get there, however, they would have to offer up better value to customers, such as lower prices. In an established”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“My many years of advising companies and making value-driven equity bets has made it crystal clear to me that the ascent of great companies is not linear but more a step function.”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

“Origination: Counter-Positioning and Cornered Resource Takeoff: Scale Economies, Network Economies and Switching Costs Stability: Process Power and Branding”
― Hamilton Wright Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy