Quotes & Sayings About Competitive Advantage

Your employees are your company's real competitive advantage. They're the ones making the magic happen-so long as their needs are being met. — Richard Branson

10 SUGGESTIONS FOR LIVING A MORE MEANINGFUL LIFE
1. Be honest with everyone.
2. Change before you have to.
3. Control your own destiny or someone else will.
4. Face reality as it is, not as it was ... or as you wish it to be.
5. Instill in others- faith, hope and self-confidence.
6. If you can't develop a competitive attitude or have a competitive advantage, don't try to compete. You'll lose.
7. Don't waste your time always looking for shortcuts.
8. Man-up when necessary.
9. Never lose faith in God.
10. Love. — Jose N. Harris

Effective leadership is the only competitive advantage that will endure. That's because leadership has two sides- what a person is character and what a person does- competence. — Stephen Covey

We don't want a third party who may or may not have our best interests in mind or our crew members' best interests in mind because they may be serving a union of one of our competitors. They are trying to equalize us and take away our competitive advantage. — David Neeleman

Shutterstock's ability to cultivate a healthy and expanding marketplace for both customers and contributors remains a key competitive advantage and a crucial component of our sustained growth. — Jon Oringer

We may well have a competitive advantage buying decent businesses at decent prices. But they won't be fabulous businesses and fabulous prices. There's too much competition and money out there, with many buyout specialists. — Charlie Munger

India is the most competitive manufacturing destination on this planet. If we are able to take advantage of that competitiveness for our domestic markets, this country would be humming with activity; industrial production will grow at 10-11% per year. — Baba Kalyani

The government's assertion that it must be unhindered in protecting our security can camouflage the desire to increase Executive power, while the press's cry of the public's right to know can mask a quest for competitive advantage or a hidden animus. Neither the need to protect our security nor the public's right to know is a blank check. — Richard Stengel

Gross profit margin demonstrates competitive advantage: it is the purest expression of customer valuation of a product, clearly implying the premium buyers assign to a seller for having fashioned raw materials into a finished item and branding it. — Lawrence A. Cunningham

To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it. One competitive advantage I had when I ventured into manufacturing was my brand "Dangote," which I diligently built in the course of my trading commodities. — Aliko Dangote

sustained high gross profit margins relative to industry peers tends to indicate durable competitive advantage. Zeroing — Lawrence A. Cunningham

I think it's a competitive advantage that both Amazon and Google and other tech companies have over a lot of their counterparts. They take big risks and are pioneering new markets with the promise of big rewards. It's why Amazon is kind of reliably starting new businesses and opening kind of new frontiers. — Brad Stone

Careers increasingly come with a reboot button, and companies that realize this early possess a competitive talent advantage — Gyan Nagpal

It's through diverse opinions and perspectives that a dynamic organisation can drive innovation and create its competitive advantage. — Craig Dent

Being able to think and invest very long term and not worry about current earnings or Wall Street analysts can be a major competitive advantage in certain businesses. Acquire — Daniel Pecaut

Your competitive advantage must be perceivable, promotable, and something the market will pay for. — Brian Tracy

If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete. — Jack Welch

Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money. — Seth Godin

The main benefit of innovation for your organization is not competitive advantage. It is survival. — Paul Sloane

The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage. — Charles Darwin

The Igbo culture, being receptive to change, individualistic, and highly competitive, gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial society. Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a wary religion, and unlike the Yoruba he was unhampered by traditional hierarchies. This kind of creature, fearing no god or man, was custom-made to grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the white man's dispensations. And — Chinua Achebe

Our behavior is driven by a fundamental core belief: the desire, and the ability, of an organization to continuously learn from any source, anywhere; and to rapidly convert this learning into action is its ultimate competitive advantage. — Jack Welch

User habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies. — Nir Eyal

When employees feel valued, and are more productive and engaged, they create a culture that can truly be a strategic advantage in today's competitive market. — Michael Hyatt

The company that consistently makes and implements decisions rapidly gains a tremendous, often decisive, competitive advantage. — Steve Blank

In a world where routine production is footloose ... competitive advantage lies not in one-time breakthroughs but in continual improvements. Stable technologies get away. — Robert Reich

I think that a lot of players and a lot of teams don't think of contact lenses as being a part of that essential gear but it truly is. You want every competitive advantage you can find and obviously having great vision is one of those advantages. — Heather O'Reilly

The information that is passed from person to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor that gives humans a competitive advantage over other animals. — Keith Henson

Develop your leaders into a competitive advantage. Reconnect your leader-power to success. — Gene Morton

Protected businesses never, never become competitive ... Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all other U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot - all at taxpayer expense. — Naomi Klein

Public discourse about climate change has resulted in the erroneous idea that it's all about cost, burden and sacrifice. If the math was correct, everyone would see it's about profit, jobs and competitive advantage. — Amory Lovins

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best. — William Zinsser

Organizational health is the single greatest competitive advantage in any business. — Patrick Lencioni

Creativity may well be the last legal unfair competitive advantage we can take to run over the competition. — David Trott

The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition. — Peter M. Senge

NASA needs to focus on the things that are really important and that we do not know how to do. The agency is a pioneering force, and that is where its competitive advantage lies. — Buzz Aldrin

The competitive advantage the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. — Seth Godin

Design is the last great competitive advantage. — Seth Godin

last frontier of competitive advantage will be the transformation of unhealthy organizations into healthy ones, — Patrick Lencioni

Accountability is not a consequence. In order for it to become your competitive advantage, you must be willing to change what you expect from yourself and others. — Sam Silverstein

High-quality web content that's useful, usable, and enjoyable is one of the greatest competitive advantages you can create for yourself online. — Kristina Halvorson

Our government is committed to helping our young people develop the skills and training they need to succeed. Through our Summer Company program, students can launch a business, become employers, and gain an advantage in the highly competitive global economy - all while still in school. — Brad Duguid

Optimism is a competitive advantage. — Jon Gordon

I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more than that. That's always been my competitive advantage. — Gary Vaynerchuk

I learned that when you can turn a presentation into a conversation, you have won the battle of converting a client; and second, I learned that the real Carla was my best competitive weapon and my key personal advantage. — Carla Harris

[In picking stocks] You really have to know a lot about business. You have to know a lot about competitive advantage. You have to know a lot about the maintainability of competitive advantage. You have to have a mind that quantifies things in terms of value. And you have to be able to compare those values with other values available in the stock market. — Charlie Munger

A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity. — Walter Isaacson

There are three important principles to Graham's approach. [The first is to look at stocks as fractional shares of a business, which] gives you an entirely different view than most people who are in the market. [The second principle is the margin-of-safety concept, which] gives you the competitive advantage. [The third is having a true investor's attitude toward the stock market, which] if you have that attitude, you start out ahead of 99 percent of all the people who are operating in the stock market - it's an enormous advantage. — Warren Buffett

Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. — Sam Walton

But even if, as Johnson argues, power and dominance serve no meaningful purpose, they always incur costs. In biology, the cost can be painfully visible. During courtship, the argus cock pheasant spreads his large secondary wing feathers, which are decorated with beautiful eye spots; the bigger they are, the more they stimulate the female. And the longer the feathers, the more progeny the cock will produce. So the more beautiful cocks produce more descendants. That should be a competitive advantage. But the evolution of the argus pheasant has run itself into a blind alley because the most gorgeous cock has feathers so huge and unwieldy that they may cause him to be eaten by a predator, because he can't fly away fast enough. Oskar Heinroth, the teacher of Konrad Lorenz, commented: 'Next to the wings of the argus pheasant, the hectic life of western civilized man is the most stupid product of intra-specific selection! — Margaret Heffernan

I genuinely believe that any business can create a competitive advantage through giving outstanding customer care. — Gary Vaynerchuk

Genuine listening ability is one of the few true forms of competitive advantage, — Feargal Quinn

What business strategy is all about-what distinguishes it from all other kinds of business planning-is, in a word, competitive advantage. Without competitors there would be no need for strategy, for the sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable the company to gain, as efficiently as possible, a sustainable edge over its competitors. — Kenichi Ohmae

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. — Patrick Lencioni

Exploiting a sustainable competitive advantage is great ... If you can find it. — Rita Gunther McGrath

You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a 'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture. — Marcus Buckingham

What made Einstein special was his impertinence, his nonconformity, and his distaste for dogma. Einstein's genius reminds us that a society's competitive advantage comes not from teaching the multiplication or periodic tables but from nurturing rebels. Grinds have their place, but unruly geeks change the world. (Walter Issacson, Wired) — Alexandra Robbins

I actually don't invest in anything that is social, mobile, deals or ad networks simply because those are areas where there are so many players and so many other smart people in the space, I feel like I don't have a competitive advantage. So I tend to go after things that are e-commerce, like healthcare. — Aaron Patzer

Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster. — Bill Jensen

While extraordinary products and unique services still afford a competitive advantage, the one advantage that stands the test of time ... is people. — Mark Salsbury

If we'd had government on [today's] scale in the 1840s, the stagecoaches would have hired lobbyists to get a bill passed that railroads could not travel faster than a horse because it would be an unfair competitive advantage. — Newt Gingrich

The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage. — Arie De Geus

We tend to think of "geography" in grandiose terms but sometimes forget that our own micro-geography can lend us competitive advantage. Taking in the "lay of the land" has always been an activity of the finest generals, and developing a practiced eye for the playing field is essential for successful strategic thought. What are the factors that make for a geographic advantage in your own interactions? Do you consciously structure situations to give yourself the geographic advantage? — Anonymous

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade - and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity. — George Soros

The transaction reflects our disciplined strategy of investing capital in core businesses where we can leverage scale and expertise for competitive advantage. In addition to being a great strategic fit, the deal is compelling financially. — Jamie Dimon

Increasingly, the winners in today's business environment are those companies that know how to leverage complexity and exploit it to create competitive advantage. — Yves Morieux

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition. The — Reid Hoffman

unless a company has some kind of economic moat, predicting how much shareholder value it will create in the future is pretty much a crapshoot, regardless of what the historical track record looks like. Looking at the numbers is a start, but it's only a start. Thinking carefully about the strength of the company's competitive advantage, and how it will (or won't) be able to keep the competition at bay, is a critical next step. — Pat Dorsey

I honestly believe that in this day and age of informational ubiquity and nanosecond change, teamwork remains the one sustainable competitive advantage that has been largely untapped. — Patrick Lencioni

A competitive advantage is not just strength versus weakness but how you are better than others in what you do. — Matthew Ashimolowo

Smiling can be a competitive advantage. It makes everyone feel better and every situation brighter. — Richard Branson

Design is a form of competitive advantage. People tend to think of design as good art, good visual language, which it absolutely has to be. But it's also about the ability to do systems thinking. — James P Hackett

Don't be color blind, be color brave. Embrace diversity as a competitive advantage. — Mellody Hobson

Giving a damn is seriously underrated and caring is a competitive advantage. — Bernadette Jiwa

Theres no competitive advantage in being just like everyone else. — Daniel Burrus

If you think about photo sharing sites, the mobile photo sharing and social, there's no competitive advantage, there's no obvious business model, so I never play with anything like that. I avoid it like the plague. — Aaron Patzer

The economic distress of America's inner cities may be the most pressing issue facing the nation. The lack of businesses and jobs in disadvantaged urban areas fuels not only a crushing cycle of poverty but also crippling social problems such as drug abuse and crime ... A sustainable economic base can be created in the inner city, but only as it has been created elsewhere: through private, for-profit initiatives and investment based on economic self-interest and genuine competitive advantage. — Michael Porter

Ammon Johns has probably forgotten more things about online marketing and branding than most of us have ever known.
Ammon Johns is unique. He has a remarkably long career in an industry that does not really do long careers. He successfully synthesizes the knowledge and experience of the past with a thorough knowledge and understanding of today.
I have had the pleasure of seeing Ammon's mind at work and it is safe to say that I simply cannot recommend him highly enough. The companies that work with him are the ones that enjoy the rarest of things in today's world: a competitive advantage. — David Amerland

Having an achievement mindset is your competitive advantage — Maxine Phillips

Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. — Justine Musk

The number one idea is to view a stock as an ownership of the business and to judge the staying quality of the business in terms of its competitive advantage. Look for more value in terms of discounted future cash-flow than you are paying for. Move only when you have an advantage. — Charlie Munger

Natural resources have dropped out of the competitive equation. In fact, a lack of natural resources may even be an advantage. Because the industries we are competing for - the industries of the future - are all based on brainpower. — Lester Thurow

Managers' responsibility is to ensure that people deliver the expected results, which are the company's strategy. The company's strategy, in turn, determines its competitive advantage. So, if a manager does a poor job of motivating employees' productivity, the enterprise is a weak competitor. — Anna Stevens

And when your phone rings, pick it up. Open yourself up to the possibility a phone call offers. Discover this remarkable device called the telephone. It will give you a serious competitive advantage. — Dan Pallotta

WTO is not the forum for labour standards. Next, the U.S. will argue the time zone difference is an unfair competitive advantage enjoyed by India that enables our software engineers to work while the Americans sleep. — Jairam Ramesh

The function of advertising is simply to promote and sustain competitive advantage for brands. — John Hegarty

We were the first multibrand platform for the customization of designer clothing. And it's great to be a first mover if you manage to pull it off. You can have a great competitive advantage. But if you're quite early, you're learning a lot: both learning as a company, and the customer is still learning. — Aslaug Magnusdottir

As long as you can bootstrap, not at the sacrifice of competitive advantage, bootstrapping is a really powerful thing because it allows you to be totally devoted to your vision. — Nick Woodman

Emotional labor is available to all of us,
but it is rarely exploited as a competitive
advantage. — Seth Godin

Employees are a company's greatest asset - they're your competitive advantage. You want to attract and retain the best; provide them with encouragement, stimulus, and make them feel that they are an integral part of the company's mission. — Anne M. Mulcahy

While Steve's gadgets and computers drew the most attention, the software that made them go was every bit as important. Steve always said that Apple's primary competitive advantage was that it created the whole widget: the finely tuned symbiosis between the hardware and the software together defined a superior user experience. In the PC world, hardware and software technologies came from different companies that didn't always even get along, including IBM and the PC-clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Intel. — Brent Schlender

There are only two ways to establish competitive advantage: do things better than others or do them differently. — Karl Albrecht

Where has this book been? The Culture Engine demystifies the what and how of driving your company's culture to produce transformational business outcomes. Chris Edmonds operationalizes culture while offering practical tools necessary to align your people and gain profound competitive advantage. — Joseph Michelli

All things being equal, the primary competitive advantage of your business will be your ability to grow Leaders Without Titles faster than your industry peers. — Robin Sharma

We must recognize that "happy" is not a business goal. Service providers pursue "happy." Leaders pursue growth, competitive advantage, mission enhancement, and cost management. — Tina Nunno

happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result. And that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement - giving us the competitive edge that I call the Happiness Advantage. — Shawn Achor

The competitive advantage of the twenty-first century is increasingly derived from hard-to-copy intangible assets such as company culture and leadership effectiveness. — Scott Keller

Management innovation is going to be the most enduring source of competitive advantage. There will be lots of rewards for firms in the vanguard. — Gary Hamel

Be swift to take advantage of business opportunities. Bigger companies are too cumbersome to move quickly; this can be a competitive advantage for you. — Richard Branson

In the House, Republican prospects have been buoyed by several successful rounds of redistricting, which have sharply reduced the number of competitive seats and given the Republicans a national advantage of at least a dozen seats. — Thomas E. Mann