I don't look at business as a zero-sum game. I don't. I've never seen it play out that way in our industry, and I think you innovate and you add value, deliver value back to customers, and you get value back from the world.
Interpretation
Business can be a collaborative endeavor where value is created and shared, rather than a competition where one party's gain is another's loss.
This quote by Marc Benioff emphasizes a perspective on business that sees it as a space for innovation and value creation rather than a competitive zero-sum game. In his view, businesses succeed by delivering value to customers, which in turn generates value for the business itself, suggesting that collaboration and mutual benefit are key to success in the industry.
In practice
During a conference on entrepreneurship, one could quote this to emphasize the importance of creating value through collaboration.
Once you know what you want and what is important for you to achieve, also define the values associated with it. What is important? That is something a lot of entrepreneurs pass by too quickly. For us, the things that were important were, No. 1, customer success. Nothing is more important to us than making sure every customer is successful in our service.
I strongly believe the business of a business is to improve the world.
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
Although I loved working on technology - I've always been a computer geek at heart - my professors encouraged me to get a real-world job working with customers.
The only constant in the technology industry is change.
The antidote to inequality is equality. The question is how do you achieve equality? I believe that, for business, which is where I can speak, we have to shift from shareholder maximization to stakeholder maximization.
When you're thinking about your next product or current product and wondering how to make it different so you don't have competition, understand the job the customer needs to get done.
The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.
A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn't simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme.
Imitation can be commercial suicide.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
Consistent alignment of capabilities and internal processes with the customer value proposition is the core of any strategy execution.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.