Richard D’Aveni quote: “This is not an age of castles, moats, and armor, where people can sustain a competitive advantage for very long. This i…”

“Capitalism is all about somebody coming and trying to take the castle. Now what you need is …. you need a castle that has some durable competitive advantage — some castle that has a moat around it.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Rules for success

“The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

Arie de Geus (1930) Dutch businessman

Arie P. de Geus, " Planning as learning https://hbr.org/1988/03/planning-as-learning/ar/1." Harvard Business Review, March/April 1988: 70-74.

“The coming nanometer age can, therefore, also be called the age of interdisciplinarity.”

Heinrich Rohrer (1933–2013) Swiss physicist

Heinrich Rohrer explaining how progress in miniaturization implies developing techniques in self-assembling molecular structures, in his Nishina Memorial Lecture at the University of Tokyo, on June 25, 1993. Published in [Nishina memorial lectures: creators of modern physics, Springer, 2008, 506, 4431770550]

“Lost golden ages can be very effective tools for motivating people in the present.”

Margaret MacMillan (1943) Canadian historian

p.61

“You dwell in whitened castles
with deep and poisoned moats
and cannot hear the curses
which fill your children's throats.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“The Roman de la Rose is the end of true mediæval poetry […] Our age calls it false taste, and no doubt our age is right;— every age is right by its own standards as long as its standards amuse it.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Adams specifies that he refers "only to the Roman of William of Lorris, which dates from the death of Queen Blanche and of all good things, about 1250". He describes the rather cynical continuation by Jean de Meung, about 1300, as "beyond our horizon".
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Companies are in the midst of a revolutionary transformation. Industrial age competition is shifting to information age competition. During the industrial age, from 1850 to about 1975, companies succeeded by how well they could capture the benefits from economies of scale and scope. Technology mattered, but, ultimately, success accrued to companies that could embed the new technology into physical assets that offered efficient, mass production of standard products.
During the industrial age, financial control systems were developed in companies, such as General Motors, DuPont, Matsushita, and General Electric, to facilitate and monitor efficient allocations of financial and physical capital. A summary financial measure such as return-on-capital employed (ROCE) could both direct a company’s internal capital to its most productive use and monitor the efficiency by which operating divisions used financial and physical capital to create value for shareholders.
The emergence of the information era, however, in the last decades of the twentieth century, made obsolete many of the fundamental assumptions of industrial age competition. No longer could companies gain sustainable competitive advantage by merely deploying new technology into physical assets rapidly, and by excellent management of financial assets and liabilities.”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 2-3