Competitors Quotes

Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has. ~ David McCullough

We will always meet rivals in everything we do, but the most dangerous are those we believe to be our friends. ~ Paulo Coelho

Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity-advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary. ~ Jean Baker Miller

In order to become a success, a business doesn't just have to do well, it has to to better than its competitors. Being number one isn't just about bragging rights. Often it means the difference between prospering and merely hanging on. ~ Mitt Romney

You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers. ~ Mark Pincus

Fannie and Freddie are creations of government. They were given a huge leg up over their competitors. ~ Nancy Pfotenhauer

Sometimes your worst competitors are the ones which are dying because they do stupid things. ~ John Caudwell

And even if we make good plans based on the best information available at the time and people do exactly what we plan, the effects of our actions may not be the ones we wanted because the environment is nonlinear and hence is fundamentally unpredictable. As time passes the situation will change, chance events will occur, other agents such as customers or competitors will take actions of their own, and we will find that what we do is only one factor among several which create a new situation. ~ Stephen Bungay

Big business learned that if you stopped fighting big government, you could profit from it by killing your smaller competitors. ~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.

the prices seem to reflect how far Staples believes the user lives from a competitor's store. Staples confirmed that it varies prices by a number of factors but declined to be specific. ~ Julia Angwin

Like families, competitors can bring out the worst as well as the best in each other. Like romance, competition has many faces, some of them ugly. In addition to showing me my grace and graciousness, the mirror of sports has reflected back to me my jealousy, pettiness, and arrogance. ~ Mariah Nelson

For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck's top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats.* This "kill the company" exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain-framed activity in terms of losses. ~ Adam M. Grant

Without competitors there would be no need for strategy. ~ Kenichi Ohmae

None of our competitors have ever made two systems that run the same software. ~ Trip Hawkins

In practice, without appropriate government intervention, Smith's "invisible hand" dons brass knuckles and conducts gang warfare, creating fierce battles between competitors who would be more than happy to define and enforce their own private property interests according to their own subjective rules. ~ Denise Caruso

It's not publicly known, but antivirus companies co-operate all the time. On the surface, antivirus vendors are direct competitors. And in fact, the competition is fierce on the sales and marketing side. But on the technical side, we're actually very friendly to each other. It seems that everyone knows everyone else. ~ Mikko Hypponen

The most important thing I learned [from running] is that there is only one runner in this race, and that is me. ~ George A. Sheehan

The best I fight is when I'm just there being a competitor and enjoying myself. ~ Alexis Davis

Collaboratition: the art of working with our competitors. ~ Holly Duckworth

Communicate. Listen to your customers, associates and competitors. ~ J. Willard Marriott

Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped. ~ David Ogilvy

Did the latter[The Messenger] have a predecessor, who envisaged
revelation as taking place by direct contact with a divine being rather than by
a book being sent down (whether as a whole or in instalments), who claimed
to have enjoyed such contact himself and who objected to the pagan angels -
not because they violated the dividing line between God and created beings
but rather because they were female? We do not hear of such a predecessor
elsewhere in the Quran, but we do learn that the Messenger had competitors in
his own time, at least in Yathrib (2:79, where they share his concept of revelation
as a book), so there is nothing implausible about the proposition that there
were preachers before him too, including some whose preaching anticipated
features of his own. ~ Patricia Crone

The greater productivity of work under the division of labor is a unifying influence. It leads men to regard each other as comrades in a joint struggle for welfare, rather than as competitors in a struggle for existence. It makes friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I've seen - both in myself and my competitors - how satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, then to mistakes and missed opportunities. ~ Garry Kasparov

A sign read "Free drinks for billiards competitors only." Hand-lettered below read "All others will pay." It was written in blood. I could tell because a red fairy with what looked like black insect wings was writing it at the time, with his own dismembered finger. ~ Red Tash

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it's always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it's hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you'll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero. ~ Peter Thiel

It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview - a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before - which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific. ~ Mary Midgley

Environmentally, business in America in 1970 was very similar to business in China today. Even if a CEO wanted to be a responsible corporate citizen, he (and they were all "he's" then) simply couldn't invest a billion dollars in pollution controls to produce a product that was indistinguishable from those of his competitors. His products would be priced out of the market. Passing laws that created a clean, level playing field for whole industries had to be a core focus of the 1970s. ~ Denis Hayes

Second, we have to make the most of the strengths we have, the amenities that many of our competitors cannot replicate. But again, those advantages won't mean much if we don't do a great job with the basics of our business. ~ Gerard Arpey

I realized early on, maybe better than some of my competitors did, that a textile business can run only if you have scale. I decided to horizontally and vertically integrate, adding everything from spinning, dyeing, weaving, and stitching to processing and packing. ~ Mian Muhammad Mansha

Unlike other sports, which are largely determined by individual athletic ability or team strength, NASCAR requires its competitors to cooperate in order to win. ~ Charles Duhigg

Scout out competitors' websites. Everything your competitors think is important or relevant usually exists on their website. ~ John Manning

By overhauling current rules and speeding the entry of competitors in the market, we encourage competition and provide our constituents with new choices and cheaper bills. ~ Melissa Bean

The standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have. ~ Paul Graham

An extremely competitive retail market is pushing extensive discounting and large volumes of wine at low prices, and New World competitors from South America and South Africa are also impacting on the market. ~ Trevor O'Hoy

BMW models are more powerful on average than competitors. This is precisely what we are aiming for: less fuel consumption and more driving pleasure. ~ Norbert Reithofer

You'll never learn a thing from a competitor weaker than you. ~ Harvey MacKay

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

When you're Singapore's leader and your existence depends on performance - extraordinary performance, better than your competitors - when that performance disappears because the system on which it's been based becomes eroded, then you've lost everything... I try to tell the younger generation that and they say the old man is playing the same record, we've heard it all before. I happen to know how we got here and I know how we can unscramble it." - On one freak election result ruining Singapore ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Katarina Witt. She was the ultimate competitor. She would just stare down people before competition. She was relentless on the ice. ~ Sarah Hughes

This law ... defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war. ~ Daniel Quinn

Why I love chess and tennis - the volleying aspect, and the fact that your competitors' reactions and motivations and bluffs come into the game itself. ~ Christopher Bollen

I would be more familiar with Janet Jackson than I was with the Teardrop Explodes or Joy Division, because I didn't want to listen to my competitors for fear of nicking ideas off them. ~ Robert Smith

You only stay in front by coming up with ideas your new competitors haven't thought of yet. ~ Kevin Harrington

A big part of winning is having lots of good luck. And I think a good competitor makes his own luck. That's why he is a winner. Luck to me is lots of determination lots of hard work, faith in myself, and in God. ~ Lane Frost

The Purpose gives the array of these actions coherence, not just at any given moment, but over time, and thus helps ensure that the firm does achieve a genuine specialization, a genuine difference from its competitors. In this way it makes superior profits possible. Purpose ~ Nikos Mourkogiannis

We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes - while our competitors get average or worse results from brilliant people managing broken processes ~ Fujio Cho

The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. Buy one to-day and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City. It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made. It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemaker's more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser: but the high-velocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you.
In short when a Peacemaker's bullet hits you in, say, the leg, you don't curse, step into shelter, roll and light a cigarette one-handed then smartly shoot your assailant between the eyes. When a Peacemaker bullet hits your leg you fall to the ground unconscious, and if it hits the thigh-bone and you are lucky enough to survive the torn arteries and shock, then you will never walk again without crutches because a totally disintegrated femur leaves the surgeon with no option but to cut your leg off. And so I stood absolut ~ Alistair MacLean

The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins. ~ Suzanne Collins

Listen to your customers, not your competitors. ~ Joel Spolsky

Beautiful women like Neila are not interested in competitors. Without a doubt she would prefer a man with the means to display her beauty to its best advantage over a man whose beauty rivalled hers. ~ Karen Lord

They were very generous with me. Everybody was willing to talk about their particular accident, what they had to deal with and how they got back in touch with their competitors' spirit. ~ Gregory Hines

We're all competitors, you know? The player wants to get a hit. The manager wants to win. I want to get it right. To tell you the truth, I just love that competition. ~ Bruce Froemming

Before you were born, and were still too tiny for the human eye to see, you won the race for life from among 250 million competitors. And yet, how fast you have forgotten your strength, when your very existence is proof of your greatness. ~ Suzy Kassem

Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles. ~ Garry Kasparov

Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees. ~ Terry Eagleton

When there are doubters, it always fuels the fire a little bit. When people say you can't do something, if you are a competitor, that drives you. ~ Ben Roethlisberger

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

The media propagates a message that corporations want, and there's a belittling and mocking of the poor and celebration of wealth. A kind of cutthroat, rapacious capitalism is celebrated on reality television shows where you betray and manipulate and push aside your competitors for fleeting fame and money. These are sick values, but they're disseminated through corporate media in almost every program you watch. ~ Chris Hedges

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I went to the starting line of the 1976 Olympic marathon in Montreal, it was with the unsettling conviction that some of my competitors were cheaters. ~ Don Kardong

More than anything else, kindness is a way of life. It is a way of living and walking through life. It is a way of dealing with all that is-our selves, our bodies, our dreams and goals, our neighbors, our competitors, our enemies, our air, our earth, our animals, our space, our time, and our very consciousness. Do we treat all creation with kindness? Isn't all creation holy and divine? ~ Jean Maalouf

I saw greatness in John and he lived up to it. I also saw a tremendous competitor who loved to win. John is a standard bearer, someone that players, coaches, fans and the Raider Nation can all look up to. One of his great virtues, the fire that burned brightest in him, was his love and passion for football, which was seldom ever equaled. ~ Al Davis

The nation's chronic weakness is its political system, which is nearing dysfunction. If the U.S. can elect better political leadership, it should be able to manage problems better than most competitors. ~ David Ignatius

I don't have to be enemies with someone to be competitors with them. ~ Jackie Joyner-Kersee

There is no age, height, or weight requirement to skate. It is good exercise no matter what your age is. If you want to be competitive, most start young. But, I practice with many adult competitors. ~ Nancy Kerrigan

I do remember when I first went into politics, one of my competitors asked me, 'Well, Jenny Shipley, who's looking after your children?' I don't think many of my male colleagues have faced a similar question. ~ Jenny Shipley

We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards. ~ Jeff Bezos

God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription-there was none that anyone had been able to find in over a century and a half-but because the political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is. ~ John Taylor Gatto

I think Jim Taylor was very underrated, never hear much about him. We played Green Bay every year in exhibition, and generally we played them every couple of years in regular season. And I always thought he was a fierce competitor. ~ Bob Lilly

Obtaining sought skills is critical in gaining an advantage over others (competitors), but being fluent in English could enable you to leap into the next level of success in international business. ~ John Taskinsoy

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

The practice of that which is ethically best - what we call goodness or virtue - involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows ... It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence ... Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

I've seen articles suggesting that Wal-Mart buys at prices lower than our competitors', and that this gives Wal-Mart an unfair advantage. I don't believe it ... What we hear is concern that in some circumstances, Wal-Mart may actually be paying more than our competitors. ~ S. Robson Walton

According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.
For the teleologist an organism exists because it was made for the conditions in which it is found; for the Darwinian an organism exists because, out of many of its kind, it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it is found.
Teleology implies that the organs of every organism are perfect and cannot be improved; the Darwinian theory simply affirms that they work well enough to enable the organism to hold its own against such competitors as it has met with, but admits the possibility of indefinite improvement. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

We suffer not from overproduction but from undercirculation. You have heard of technocracy. I wish I had those fellows for my competitors. I'd like to take the automobile it is said they predicted could be made now that would last fifty years. Even if never used, this automobile would not be worth anything except to a junkman in ten years, because of the changes in men's tastes and ideas. This desire for change is an inherent quality in human nature, so that the present generation must not try to crystallize the needs of the future ones. ~ Charles Kettering

Do you understand the real reason why your customers choose your products or services? Or why they choose something else instead? How do your products or services help your customers to make progress in their lives? In which circumstances are they trying to make that progress? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of this progress? What is competing with your products and services to address these jobs? Are there competitors outside of those included in the traditional view of your industry? ~ Clayton M Christensen

(About importance of focusing on one sport at a time) I've never tried to do that, we have more of a holistic approach. We want to become better decathletes and better competitors. I think for us that means just toeing the line at whatever it is we're doing that day and being confident in preparing as best as we can. Later in the year, late in the season when we have all of the thousands of reps under our belt, we can try to maybe focus on one or two things and leave some stuff off one week. Really, we like to keep everything inside the routine and part of the process. ~ Trey Hardee

Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor. ~ Sam Walton

Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad. ~ Eric Ries

Obsess about customers, not competitors. ~ Jeff Bezos

No matter how senior you get in an organization, no matter how well you're perceived to be doing, your job is never done. Every day, you get up and the world is changing; your customers are expecting more from you. Your competitors are putting pressure on you by doing more and trying to beat you here and beat you there. ~ Abigail Johnson

Our brain is funny. Its primary function is to keep us safe from danger. It has us believe that in order to insulate us from such, we must work harder, meaner, and longer to stay ahead of potential competitors who can rip the rug out from under us at any moment. But the reality is, when we are well rested and reflective rather than reactive, we put ourselves in a better place; a place that is well insulated from the ultimate danger of meaningless or, even worse, toxic, self-destructive work. ~ Charles F. Glassman

I'm the competitor, I'm the one who has to wear the brunt of that being a good or bad score. And I'm not too worried about it. I don't know why so many are to be honest with you. ~ Kelly Slater

Naturally, the first time Garreth encountered his mate - the one he'd awaited so long - she'd seen him calling his competitors pussies and playing by dirty rules. He was shirtless, well on his way to being drunk, and filthy with blood and mud. He wasn't even wearing shoes. And it probably appeared as if he'd been about to take part in an orgy. ~ Kresley Cole

I'm a spreadsheet guy. But you get to that moment of truth, and it has nothing to do with a spreadsheet. You've got to factor in what your competitors are doing, what the technology is doing, what your shareholders want, what your employees want, what your customers want, and you've got to make it happen sometimes. ~ Brian Roberts

A coach has to worry not so much about creating motivation, esprit de corps, as about destroying it. The true competitor has it; he wouldn't be a star if he didn't. So you have to mold all these egos together and make sure in your selection of people that you don't destroy the feeling of togetherness or morale, because it is a fragile thing. ~ Dick Motta

After all, if you have the majority of customers, then what you do becomes the standard. Your competitors have little choice but to follow. If you are the leader, then having a nonstandard infrastructure is a bad idea. Ultimately, it leads to extinction. ~ Douglas Gwyn

Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether. Conservatism pretends that there is only one possible equilibrium - a nostalgic version of the status quo - that society could play. Libertarianism ignores the possibility of equilibrium selection at the level of rational social discourse, and assumes that decentralized market dynamics will magically lead to equilibria that yield the highest aggregate social benefits. Far from being a scientific front for a particular set of political views, modern evolutionary psychology makes most standard views look simplistic and unimaginitive. ~ Geoffrey Miller

The course of time, all of Apple's competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone. ~ Simon Sinek

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way. ~ James Dyson

One of the things I benefited from when I started this business was that I didn't know anything. I was just instinct with no preconceived notions. This enabled me to learn and change quickly without having to worry about maintaining any kind of status quo, like some of my bigger competitors. ~ Michael Dell

Work with your competitors when the interest of the community and planet are at stake. ~ Simon Mainwaring

As new mainstream customers are acquired and new markets are conquered, the product becomes part of the public face of the company, with important implications for PR, marketing, sales, and business development. In most cases, the product will attract competitors: copycats, fast followers, and imitators of all stripes. ~ Eric Ries

A primary goal of teaching anything is the advantage that learning gives to people over their competitors who haven't been as well taught. ~ Bobby Knight

The beauty of this country and what people participate in is the competitive nature that we allow to exist and the fact is that we are better because we have great competitors. ~ Lee Scott

You first compete with yourself before competing against others; if you cannot beat your last best result, do not be surprised if it seems difficult to compete against external competitors. ~ Archibald Marwizi

But the very success which had intoxicated them rendered them also too complacent to learn from less prosperous competitors. ~ Olaf Stapledon

The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents. ~ Margaret Halsey

There are a lot of doubts over the size and effect of new competitors in the cellular sector. ~ Antonio Machado