Business

Many people say that if you're the brightest person in the room, you're in the wrong room – that's totally right. You need to bring in people with much more expertise than you to take the business forward. I started out making shoes by hand – I'm a shoemaker, not an intellectual.

As a founder, you're not God. You're a mere piece of the puzzle. To have a company grow, it has to have a lot of people and those people need to feel ownership. You need a winning culture to keep people driving forward. It's not just about loving each other's company, it's about winning together.

I went to collect my prize… it was an American dictionary! Well…when we were looking for a name, I picked up this dictionary and started to flick through. I remember the letter 'R' felt like a good, strong letter and I was flicking through I got to the word R-E-E-B-O-K – a small African gazelle! Well, that felt like us!

Jeff and I tried our best but all our father could say is, 'when I'm gone, the business is yours…' – number 1, we didn't want our Dad to go.. and number 2, it was clear the business would be gone before he was. The business was dying.

I'd never even heard the word 'entrepreneur' growing up – I didn't know what that meant. If I go back to my grandfather – he was the real entrepreneur. He developed things… he made spiked running shoes when he was only 15 (in 1895!). My grandfather died in 1933, I was born in 1935 and my grandmother insisted I brought his name with me – so I became the next Joe Foster.

Wherever there's judgement there's noise, and more than you think. In the criminal justice system, we saw variability between judges in the severity of their sentencing for equivalent crimes. In business, you may have a company where someone in hiring says, 'bring everyone in, I think they're great' and you end up with a company full of people who shouldn't be there.

Legal scholar & behavioral economist; Obama administration official; "Nudge" theory pioneer

You have to step back and focus on the merits of the offer- not the person who brought the offer to you. That's how you defend yourself. You recognise that there's something that goes on first as important as the message itself inclining you towards purchase or agreement.

Influence & Persuasion Expert; Author of "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

If you go into a new situation where you don't know anybody and you want to be more influential, don't look around the room and say hmmm… who can most help me here?… instead, look around and say hmmm…. Who can I most help here? You will put that person in a position where they will be standing on the balls of their feet to help you!

Influence & Persuasion Expert; Author of "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

When you're blending digital and physical, you'd better know how things are made. When I talk to my students it's shocking how few of them have ever been to a factory, and how few of them know what a CNC machine is or how goods get from A to B efficiently.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

The enemy has to be outside the building, not inside. If the enemy is outside the building, whether you're working on innovation or your quarterly sales-target, you're on the same team… you're playing for the name on the front of the jersey, not the back.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained. When we started our research, we thought that all these new Silicon Valley businesses were going to come in and destroy the incumbents. What we actually found was that a number of incumbents were doing things that really allowed them to respond and be ready for change.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

Amazon is the archetype of a great brainy and brawny business because they do both so well but since every company is going to have to do those things, the skill set required of leaders will be different over the next couple of decades. In the old days, you could stay within a function, rise through that function, adding teammates to complement your skills…Today I talk about systems of leadership – and you need the ability to see the entire system.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

We didn't want to be the best shipper of plastic, nor the best streaming technology, we positioned ourselves as a great place to find stories. We could make that true in the DVD world and the digital world through things like our taste-engine meaning that whether the product came in the post or through a wire, customers saw it as the same.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

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