Top 100 Ries Quotes
#1. A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory ... dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.
Rumer Godden
#2. The mind, as you age, Is an artist, it seems. Monet paints your mem'ries, Picasso your dreams.
Robert Breault
#3. I'm ashamed, this is my mama. No matter how fly my braids is, how I grease my skin, scalp, no matter how many jew'ries, this is my mother. -Said by Precious Jones in Push
Sapphire.
#4. Ere long this golden light shall pass and fade
Except all cherish'd mem'ries ye have made.
Timothy Salter
#5. The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
Eric Ries
#6. We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.
Eric Ries
#7. engineers agree to adapt the product to the business's constantly changing requirements but are not responsible for the quality of those business decisions.
Eric Ries
#8. The real barrier (to building a brand) is the human mind. It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears.
Al Ries
#9. A branding program should be designed to differentiate your cow from all the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle on the range look pretty much alike.
Al Ries
#10. Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.
Eric Ries
#11. If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed - at seeing what happens - but won't necessarily gain validated learning - If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
#12. Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.
Eric Ries
#13. Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.
Eric Ries
#14. The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.
Eric Ries
#15. It's better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.
Al Ries
#16. The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Eric Ries
#17. A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer.
Al Ries
#18. The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource - the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation.
Eric Ries
#19. HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process.
Eric Ries
#20. Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.
Eric Ries
#22. It's the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn't invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect's mind.
Al Ries
#23. focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work.
Eric Ries
#24. THE LAW OF THE CONTRACTION: A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus.
Al Ries
#25. Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.
Eric Ries
#26. Advertising is the way great brands get to be great brands.
Al Ries
#27. The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
Eric Ries
#28. Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.
Al Ries
#29. the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.
Eric Ries
#30. Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building.
Eric Ries
#31. Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don't need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision - a way to be more successful - they have to remain nimble enough to take it.
Eric Ries
#32. Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.
Eric Ries
#34. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
#35. What's your brand? If you can't answer that question about your own brand in two or three words, your brand's in trouble.
Al Ries
#36. Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y', so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.
Eric Ries
#37. The mind, as a defense against the volume of today's communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.
Al Ries
#38. Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.
Eric Ries
#39. exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
Eric Ries
#40. When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy.
Eric Ries
#41. we think we can truly short-circuit the ramp by killing things that don't make sense fast and doubling down on the ones that do.
Eric Ries
#42. The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
Eric Ries
#43. Don't play semantic games with the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It's a seduction.
Al Ries
#44. As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team's ability to learn in order to work more "efficiently.
Eric Ries
#45. As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
Eric Ries
#46. Reading is good, action is better.
Eric Ries
#47. Most of the time customers don't know what they want in advance.)
Eric Ries
#48. Prove to yourself that your business, in micro-scale at least, creates value. If you believe it, you'll find it that much easier to convince potential investors, partners and employees, too.
Eric Ries
#49. All innovation begins with vision. It's what happens next that is critical.
Eric Ries
#50. Product managers figure out what features are likely to please customers; product designers then figure out how those features should look and feel.
Eric Ries
#51. managers in most companies are already overwhelmed with good ideas. Their challenge lies in prioritization and execution,
Eric Ries
#52. The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity.
Al Ries
#53. If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.
Eric Ries
#54. A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
Eric Ries
#55. Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.
Eric Ries
#56. achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.
Eric Ries
#57. The problem with entrepreneurship is we are often working really hard producing high quality products that no-one wants. The creation of stuff is not valued.
Eric Ries
#58. If you can build a powerful brand, you will have a powerful marketing program. If you CAN'T then all the advertising, fancy packaging, sales promotion and public relations in the world won't help you achieve your objective.
Al Ries
#59. The best way to make news is to announce a new category, not a new product.
Al Ries
#60. The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.
Eric Ries
#61. The next generation product almost never comes from the previous generation.
Al Ries
#62. Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills.
Al Ries
#63. Better to have bad news that's true than good news we made up
Eric Ries
#64. learn whether to pivot or persevere.
Eric Ries
#65. For one thing, everyone would insist that assumptions be stated explicitly and tested rigorously not as a stalling tactic or a form of make-work but out of a genuine desire to discover the truth that underlies every project's vision.
Eric Ries
#66. I call this building an adaptive organization, one that automatically adjusts its process and performance to current conditions.
Eric Ries
#67. 1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?
2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?
3. Would they buy it from us?
4. Can we build a solution for that problem?
Ries Eric
#68. The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospects mind.
Al Ries
#69. Cycle after cycle, the team is working hard, but the business is not seeing results. Managers trained in a traditional model draw the logical conclusion: our team is not working hard, not working effectively, or not working efficiently.
Eric Ries
#70. The question is not "Can this product be built?" In the modern economy, almost any product that can be imagined can be built. The more pertinent questions are "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?" To
Eric Ries
#71. we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning.
Eric Ries
#72. Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.
Al Ries
#73. It normally takes decades to build a brand ... It's the forgetting of the old truth that allows a person to accept a new truth. You need to allow enough time for this forgetting to take place
Al Ries
#74. Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.
Eric Ries
#75. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
Eric Ries
#76. Only brand names register in the mind ... What you should generally do is take a regular word and use it out of context to connote the primary attribute of your brand.
Al Ries
#77. The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position.
Al Ries
#78. The critical first question for any lean transformation is: which activities create value and which are a form of waste? Once
Eric Ries
#79. Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn't mean it cannot be managed.
Eric Ries
#80. I actually believed if you work hard enough it was inevitable you'd succeed. Then I lived the 'Social Network' movie, but only the first half. The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.
Eric Ries
#81. War and marketing have many similarities.
Al Ries
#82. Marketing is not selling. Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect.
Al Ries
#83. A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
Eric Ries
#84. A laser is a weak source of energy. A laser takes [only] a few watts of energy and focuses them in a coherent stream of light. But with a laser, you can drill a hole in a diamond or wipe out cancer.
Al Ries
#85. Changing the direction of a large company is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier. It takes a mile before anything happens. And if it was a wrong turn, getting back on course takes even longer.
Al Ries
#86. Startups don't starve; they drown." There
Eric Ries
#87. Fire that customer," I'd say to the person responsible for recruiting for our tests. "Find me someone in our target demographic." If the next customer was more positive, I would take it as confirmation that I was right in my targeting. If not, I'd fire another customer and try again.
Eric Ries
#88. The tremendous success of general management over the last century has provided unprecedented material abundance, but those management principles are ill suited to handle the chaos and uncertainty that startups must face.
Eric Ries
#89. Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
Eric Ries
#90. It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.
Eric Ries
#91. Successful brands get into the mind slowly. A blurb in a magazine. A mention in a newspaper. A comment from a friend. A display in a retail store. After a slow buildup, people become convinced that they have known about the brand forever.
Al Ries
#92. Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.
Al Ries
#93. A startup's job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.
Eric Ries
#94. Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
Eric Ries
#95. You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don't see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom.
Eric Ries
#96. In fact, entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.
Eric Ries
#97. It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.
Eric Ries
#98. A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.
Eric Ries
#99. The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.
Eric Ries
#100. In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today's dynamic, lean economy, it's more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth.
Eric Ries
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