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.
If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them - preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.
The best client is a scared millionaire.
Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.
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.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.