The single greatest deficit that Europe faces today is not a budget, current-account or trade deficit… but a growth one. With stronger growth, a lot of these problems would be quite a bit easier to handle, if not to resolve.

What I like the most and essentially is never done is to start off a negotiation by talking about how you'll negotiate, what's the process going to be? And to say things like 'my goal in this negotiation is to reach an agreement with you in which we create a giant pie and split it evenly and can we agree that that's our goal?'

A crucial realization for me is that the management styles of the West and East are not mutually exclusive. In fact, blending the best elements of each can be highly effective. Western management, particularly in Silicon Valley, is often seen as a triumph of capitalism, primarily focused on maximizing shareholder value. Contrastingly, my experience with NTT revealed a different approach, one that prioritizes stakeholders, sometimes even more than shareholders.

Firstly, pay has to be high enough to give people agency in their own lives and secondly, humans have to be treated like humans. Those are the minimum conditions for good jobs – there also needs to be a career path that enables people to learn and grow in their jobs.

Life is a series of decisions you make with imperfect information — and then carrying it through with conviction, while at the same time looking over your shoulder to make sure the rest of the team is coming along with you

Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world.

Until now, we had an insolvency problem – but we didn't have a liquidity problem that could trigger that insolvency because interest rates were so low. Now they're rising, and the mother of all debt crises is going to occur.

You become immune to the evils of criticism and flattery and enjoy a fundamental self-esteem and not a desire for self-image. This is dependent on others and can be taken away any time you are not validated.

There is no business without creativity. And I think we have a lot of examples of great organisations that didn't want to be creative. Kodak is a good example, they didn't want to see the digital world! Creativity for me is the first condition to establish yourself as a leader in whatever you do in life.

We have the tendency to follow those who are comparable to us. It reduces uncertainty and provides us with an extremely effective shortcut into deciding how to best behave in a world that has become overloaded with information and stimulus. We need shortcuts!

Meaningful and moral are different in an interesting sense; something can be meaningful, and yet be morally terrible. Adolf Eichmann was clearly engaged in what he thought was a meaningful pursuit, perhaps he was even in a state of flow, thinking that what he was doing was 'good' – even though he was the architect of the death of millions.

What we commonly refer to as business ethics bears little resemblance to ethics in its conventional sense. Instead, it functions more as a defensive strategy designed to shield corporate value from the scrutiny of regulations and public perception.