Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.
Nolan BushnellRead
The game business reinvents itself every five years.
Interpretation
The video game industry undergoes significant changes and innovations roughly every five years.
Nolan Bushnell's quote highlights the dynamic nature of the game industry, emphasizing that it is continuously evolving to adapt to new technologies and consumer preferences. This reinvention cycle is crucial for staying relevant in a fast-paced market, reflecting the necessity of innovation and responsiveness within the business landscape.
In practice
In a keynote speech at a gaming conference.
Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.
Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place.
A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.
Everybody copied Atari products. So we started messing with them and it was fun. We bought enough chips that we could get them mislabeled. So we bankrupted at least two companies which copied our boards, and bought all the parts but they were the wrong parts, so they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell because the games don't work.
Do I really want to do a mobile game that's one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.
If you don't hire at least one or two people that are smarter than you are, then you're a terrible manager and I don't need you.
The extravagance of any corporate office is directly proportional to management's reluctance to reward the shareholders.
Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only these two β basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are 'costs'.
Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.
In the long run managements stressing accounting appearance over economic substance usually achieve little of either.
It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.
When you are in business for a long time, you go through good times and bad times. When you go through bad times, you learn to control costs, satisfy customers better, satisfy employees better and become more transparent. Therefore, you build character in the company.
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