Profitability Quotes

I won't close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable. ~ Warren Buffett

…it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster pursuing its ends regardless of any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and to insist that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, lie real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. (…) the fate of whole swathes of society and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability with a blessed indifference to how its movements will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, (…) its violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals with their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic, anonymous - quite literally a conceptual violence, the violence of a Concept whose self-deployment rules and regulates social reality. ~ Slavoj Zizek

And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.' ~ John Thorn

We need to revise our economic thinking to give full value to our natural resources. This revised economics will stabilize both the theory and the practice of free-market capitalism. It will provide business and public policy with a powerful new tool for economic development, profitability, and the promotion of the public good. ~ Paul Hawken

Oil is once again robbing the industry of a return to profitability. Cost reductions and efficiency gains have never been more critical. ~ Giovanni Bisignani

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business. ~ Jeff Bezos

If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man. ~ Paul Krugman

All the evidence over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and the profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky, against the real needs of their occupants. The psychology of high-rise life had been exposed with damaging results. Living in high-rises required a special type of behavior, one that was acquiescent, restrained, even perhaps slightly mad. A psychotic would have a ball here. ~ J.G. Ballard

I think the only way to maintain profitability is to meet the needs of the customers. ~ Ofra Strauss

Too many startups get in the habit of continually raising more and more money, which has the deleterious effect of both pushing out profitability and limiting your exit options. The less rounds of capital you need to raise, the more of your company you get to own. ~ Jay Samit

We should not prioritize on the basis of project profitability, but rather on how this profitability is affected by delay. ~ Donald G. Reinertsen

Success and profitability are outcomes of focusing on customers and employees, not objectives. ~ Jack Ma

If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems. ~ Michael Porter

Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business. ~ Carlos Slim

In the simplest sense, the key to the performance of any traditional commercial bank ... is the profitability of the loans it makes. ~ Robert G. Wilmers

Of the twelve, the most powerful questions (to employees, guaging their satisfaction with their employers) are those witha combination of the strongest links to the most business outcomes (to include profitability). Armed with this perspective, we now know that the following six ar ethe most powerful questions:
1) Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2) Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3) Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4) In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
5) Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6) Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
As a manager, if you want to know what you should do to build a strong and productive workplace, securing 5s to these six questions would be an excellent place to start. ~ Marcus Buckingham

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth. ~ Peter Thiel

Supermarket companies are big logistics companies, and one of the ways we've increased profitability in the past is by re-evaluating how they do logistics. ~ Ronald Burkle

Step into the spotlight and rock the brand of you! ~ Catrice M. Jackson

I am sure there will come a time when we are going to use AMD. The products have been getting better. The acceptance is getting better. But we have not been suffering as a company for either growth or profitability because we haven't had AMD. ~ Kevin Rollins

The strongest competitive force or forces determine the profitability of an industry and become the most important to strategy formulation. The most salient force, however, is not always obvious. P. 26 ~ Michael E. Porter

Servile labour disappeared because it could not stand the competition of free labour; its un-profitability sealed its doom in the market economy. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise. ~ Peter Drucker

The success of the Starbucks has been based on this balance between profitability and a social conscience. Everywhere we're doing business, were trying to manage the business through the lens of humanity. ~ Howard Schultz

Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person - not just an employee - are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability. ~ Anne M. Mulcahy

You'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises. That must get down to the peculiarities of individual adjustment to market capitalism. I think you 'd have to know the people involved to fully understand what was happening. ~ Charlie Munger

In every company which I have done strategic planning, the number-one value people choose is always integrity. The second values may be quality of products and services, caring about people, excellent customer service, profitability , innovation, entrepreneurship, and others. But integrity always comes first. ~ Brian Tracy

Companies should not have a singular view of profitability. There needs to be a balance between commerce and social responsibility ... The companies that are authentic about it will wind up as the companies that make more money. ~ Howard Schultz

One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that. ~ Sam Altman

We oppose all corporate welfare, whether we benefit or not. You will find that our policy positions mainly hurt our profitability rather than help it. ~ Charles Koch

Your typical business just measures the metrics that have to do with the profitability of the business one way or another. But you can have metrics that measure employee happiness and the morale. You can also do direct customer surveys; you can track it over time. You can do supplier satisfaction scores as well. ~ John Mackey

Despite the "R" in CRM and the $11 billion spent on CRM software annually, many companies don't understand customer relationships at all. They lack relational intelligence - that is, they aren't aware of the variety of relationships customers can have with a firm and don't know how to reinforce or change those connections. They may be very good at capturing simple demographic data - gender, age, income, and education - and matching them with purchasing information to segment customers into profitability tiers. But this is an industrial view of customer relationships, a sign that many firms still think of customers as resources to be harvested for the next up-sell or cross-sell opportunity rather than as individuals looking for certain kinds of interactions. ~ Anonymous

Google controls two-thirds of the US search market. Almost three-quarters of all Internet users have Facebook accounts. Amazon controls about 30% of the US book market, and 70% of the e-book market. Comcast owns about 25% of the US broadband market. These companies have enormous power and control over us simply because of their economic position. They all collect and use our data to increase their market dominance and profitability. When eBay first started, it was easy for buyers and sellers to communicate outside of the eBay system because people's e-mail addresses were largely public. In 2001, eBay started hiding e-mail addresses; in 2011, it banned e-mail addresses and links in listings; and in 2012, it banned them from user-to-user communications. All of these moves served to position eBay as a powerful intermediary by making it harder for buyers and sellers to take a relationship established inside of eBay and move it outside of eBay. ~ Bruce Schneier

Twelve years ago we characterized the scene as poor service, no service, or self-service. Unfortunately, little has changed. As a result, customers understandably hesitate to pay any premium. Profitability therefore suffers, wages stagnate, and workers disengage - creating a downward spiral to yet more miserable service. ~ B. Joseph Pine II

You will always need more capital than you think, because it will always take you longer to reach profitability than you can imagine. ~ Jay Samit

The challenge, however, is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon do not publish their algorithms. In fact, the methods they use to filter the information you see are deeply proprietary and the "secret sauce" that drives each company's profitability. The problem with this invisible "black box" algorithmic approach to information is that we do not know what has been edited out for us and what we are not seeing. As a result, our digital lives, mediated through a sea of screens, are being actively manipulated and filtered on a daily basis in ways that are both opaque and indecipherable. ~ Marc Goodman

If you make a record, you should ask yourself, 'Did it make someone cry, in a good way, not a bad way?' There should almost be subjective emotional criteria for evaluating work, instead of just profitability. ~ Moby

The popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty, and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation. ~ Wendy Brown

Working with limited resources is an excellent way to hone skills that will serve you well for the rest of your career. You will prioritize profitability from the start. ~ Jon Oringer

A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. ~ James C. Collins

A dominant firm may launch new products in direct competition with any competitor that tries to fill in gaps in the market. These new products may trade on the high esteem in which clients hold the dominant firm or may simply dilute the profitability of new products for smaller firms, leading them to withdraw from the market. ~ Craig S. Fleisher

The serial bully, who in my estimation accounts for about one person in thirty in society, is the single most important threat to the effectiveness of organisations, the profitability of industry, the performance of the economy, and the prosperity of society. ~ Tim Field

I think companies trying to exercise a so-called inversion should be hit with an exit tax. So I want to change behaviors, and I am deeply distressed about quarterly capitalism, because I think it is causing businesses to make decisions that are not helping the long-term profitability of American corporations or the success of our economy. ~ Hillary Clinton

Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn't want to repeat "Steve Jobs's mistake" of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition. ~ Brad Stone

Perfectionism is the enemy of profitability. ~ Mark Cuban

Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise. ~ Warren Buffett

Improving efficiency on the farm is not only a risk-reduction strategy, it's a profitability strategy. ~ Bill Vaughan

GE is falling under the same cloud of the market as a whole. Investors are not focused on the positives that are occurring like corporate profitability. ~ James Fisher

Understanding the competitive forces, and their underlying causes, reveals the roots of an industry's current profitability while providing a framework for anticipating and influencing competition (and profitability) over time. P. 26 ~ Michael E. Porter

Even a small amount of unplanned downtime can effect a company's profitability and reputation. ~ Ratmir Timashev, CEO Veeam

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers. ~ Todd Gitlin

Our goal is to make General Motors the most valuable automotive company. Clearly, that is having sustainable profitability and driving great returns for our shareholders. ~ Mary Barra

These developments - a massive transfer of land by way of inheritance and purchase, an unprecedented rise in the profitability of land and increasing intermarriage between Celtic and English dynasties - helped to consolidate a new unitary ruling class in place of the more separate and specific landed establishments that had characterised England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the Tudor and Stuart eras. ~ Linda Colley

Profitability is the consequence of doing business in the right way, to honor God. ~ Ted Malloch

I don't care about awards and public image. We know the business of entertainment. We worship our work, we worship our clients and we worship profitability. ~ Shailender Singh

Often in companies, you'll see tensions between sales and marketing. Sales people will want to give discounts to clients because they often get paid a commission based on how much they sell. So they're always pushing to give discounts because that will increase sales. Marketing, however, is judged by overall profitability. ~ Charles Duhigg