Leadership

The people who were there at the beginning may not be the people who are scalable... As a founder, one of the hardest things you ever may need to do is take someone into your office who was there from the beginning... but who you now recognise doesn't have the skills for the next chapter of the business' journey.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement, systems that are optimised for the people who have good judgement.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

Culture is not aspirational, it's observational. It's not something you and your co-founders sit down, dream-up, put into PowerPoint, and create some posters from, for the break-out room. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

There's an innate tendency in human-beings to sort ourselves by how much we want power. Some of us don't want it at all, some of us are absolutely obsessed with it. The interaction between the individual and the system is therefore critical.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

Our brains are adapted to pick leaders based on characteristics that are no longer adaptive, or necessary today. In times of crisis for example, we are wired to gravitate towards strong men – strong males who are overconfident and speak of solutions in simplistic terms. That's what historically it took to survive.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

So many of our systems of power are reliant on people putting themselves forward and guess what- people who are power-hungry will put themselves forward for positions of power. We need to seek out people not just rely on self-selection. We need to headhunt people who have demonstrated leadership capability and integrity rather than just relying on those who speak well or who are members of the right 'club.'

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

We have to create systems that make people think twice before they behave badly. People need to credibly believe that there will be consequences to their actions if caught in random stings. If you are in a position where you are uniquely able to wield power- politics, police, corporate leadership- you should be randomly subject to attempts to see if you behave badly when offered the opportunity to do so.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

My learnings came not only from our successes, but a lot of the key learnings came from failures. When you do experience failure rather than to run away from it, you have to sit down and do a good post-mortem and learn from your failures.

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

When we open a new show, it started with about 20 creators at the table, and I will say to the rest of the company, 'leave them alone. I don't want them to be bugged by HR or finance or administrative stuff. I want them to breathe and eat and sleep only about the artistic content of the next show'.

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

Being creative is about being a collective. It's not something unique. Cirque is not a one man, or a one woman show. It's a collective. That's why we can nurture each other's creativity.

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

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.

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

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?'

Co-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor

You have to keep your business in what Jeff Bezos calls day one state. You have to keep your business on its toes, you have to be high energy, and push your people and business to do better. Never let them fall into complacency, into a day two business state. They'd rather always keep them young, energetic, on their toes and hungry.

If you go into a business and see an organisational handbook... you're in trouble. When people spend too much time drawing up organisational rules and charts, they're spending less time with customers. Hierarchical structures are the death of flexibility, they are the death of agility and remove the distributed leadership needed to make business work.

In the business world, we need to focus on the 4-Cs. Firstly, Customer. Secondly, Competition. Thirdly, Comfort. It doesn't matter how successful you are, how much market share you have, if you're in your comfort zone you will leave yourself exposed. Fourth, Courage. You have to be prepared to take tough decisions. Cowardice pushes the day of reckoning out, decisiveness brings it closer.

When you look at a business in trouble, the important thing is to understand where the trouble is coming from. Critically you need to know whether it's a restructuring or transformation. A restructuring is where you adjust structures to a reduced volume or revenue level, but in this case the business model is not broken. In transformations, you still restructure, but you are dealing with a potentially broken business model.