The reality is that most companies are not about any values at all - they are about making money. It is extremely rare for a business to stand for anything because most businesses don't want to alienate potential customers, and if you believe in anything you are going to alienate someone.
Very often, I think about the people that I represent. I meet people who have thousands and thousands of employees and millions and millions of customers - and also make a lot of money. But I think about the millions of Europeans that I represent in order to try to balance that so we can meet on more equal terms.
Growing your own business is great. Watching your ideas come to life, taking care of new customers and watching them become repeat customers, and successfully building your team is a feeling that can't be matched.
Corporate America cannot afford to remain silent or passive about the downward spiral we are undergoing. It cannot turn a blind eye to how difficult the experience of life is for so many of their customers.
Never forget that you only have one opportunity to make a first impression - with investors, with customers, with PR, and with marketing.
What you find is, you have to deliver a product that has value to the customer. When you do, and I think the wind community is getting much closer to that, customers will want it.
Manufacturers must accept responsibility for their customers' safety.
If you wait for customers to tell you that you need to do something, you're too late. Good business leaders should be half a step ahead of what customers want, i.e. they don't actually quite know they want it. That's what innovation's about. With Plan A, we didn't wait for the consumers to tell us.
Customers often value a good more when its price goes up. One reason may be its signaling value. An expensive handcrafted mechanical watch may tell time no more accurately than a cheap quartz model; but, because few people can afford one, buying it signals that the owner is rich.
With tough interpretation of taxi and zoning regulations, neither Uber nor Airbnb would have gotten started. By the time many cities recognized their existence, both were fairly large and had the political support of their customers.
In the web products and services world, you have a real-time interaction with your customers, and then a real-time editing of how you as a company are doing.
When times are good, there is budget available for increased research on secondary products or customers.
For businesses to be successful, they need to constantly ask the question: 'How can we provide value to our customers?' At the end of the day, that is what matters.
I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television's most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.
As a small business owner, I've had to find ways to keep costs as low as possible while still providing customers with the ability to use their credit cards for payments. Many credit card processing companies are so expensive when it comes to fees that it started to feel like a losing proposition to offer this payment option.
The issue is not to ask your customers what they want today, but to try to imagine what the customer is going to want in a world where, for instance, their cellphone is in their glasses.
All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.
We are going to make people who do some things with Santander into loyal customers who bank with us every day. This is what will allow us to compete in a world where banking customers have more and more choice. If we don't do this, then we won't grow in the next decade.
Every entrepreneur needs ideas, vision, and creativity - no matter what the product or service. Not only that, but the product should truly delight customers and become an essential part of their lives.
You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.
If you work for and eventually lead a company, understand that companies have multiple stakeholders including employees, customers, business partners and the communities within which they operate.
I actually think it's better I started by being close to customers. That foundation early on helped me later when I went into logistics and other kinds of management.
If your goal is to provide a service at terms your customers can afford, you have to figure out how to offer your services at price points such that your aggregated costs are lower than your aggregated revenues.
We have a lot of customers in Japan, but they don't quite get the local content that they always need, so we want to encourage all of our product teams to start thinking globally.
We have very close relationships with our Canadian customers.
As with anything we do as entrepreneurs, researching how our businesses impact and influence our customers and our markets - and our world - is critical to building something of value as a business.
Customers have different need states and life experiences.
For me, it's important that I can talk to my customers all over the world. They can comment on what they like, tell me what fits - we have a daily dialogue. I can also see what she looks like and how she wears my shoes, which is a huge advantage. Thank God for Instagram; it helps me keep connected.
We're trying to make the music service a cultural point of reference, and that's why we're making video. We're making video for our Apple Music customers and our future customers.
In the cloud, customers don't want a six-month contract negotiation; that concept is absurd when you can implement a cloud-based suite from beginning to end in a month or a few months.
My entrepreneurial spirit happened all day long because I got to think of things that kids would interact with. I was in front of my customers for 6-8 hours a day. I got to see what they like, what they don't like, what they connected with, and most importantly, did they learn something from this?
We are going to have a suite of products that you subscribe to - television, high-speed Internet, phone, home security, energy management, maybe even health care - and we are going to have many customers that are going to buy those products directly from us.
Banks can't recoup the costs of serving customers who save in small amounts and transact frequently.
A contingent bailout policy - implicit or explicit - must be coupled with some regulation of what banks can and cannot do. For example, a ban on lending to uncreditworthy customers might well make sense.
Business has to stand up on behalf of its employees, on behalf of immigration, on behalf of its customers, and on behalf of supply chain-cum-globalization.
You have got the right strategy, the right geography; you have got the right customers. You need to prioritise them better; we need to grow them better, mind them better. We need to give more value to them, and we need to execute a lot of areas in the organisation where we are not executing.