Business

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

People don't know what it is that they're negotiating over… If you don't, then it's hard to know if you've gotten a bad deal, a fair deal, or a great deal! That's going to lead us to the negotiation pie, and with the negotiation pie comes the extra value that negotiators create by coming together.

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

Sometimes it doesn't matter if the other side doesn't care about fairness; provided you do, you explain what's going on. I'm now playing his game and I pick something that's arbitrary. And now it's arbitrary vs. arbitrary versus principle versus arbitrary.

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

The first thing I'd say is a big mistake is not caring about what the other side wants. Oftentimes people are thinking I have to say no to the other side. My goal is to say yes to them. It's to figure out what it is they want and give it to them.

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

I think people all the time, hide or lie about information that would be useful to share. If you think about somebody who's selling their business because they want to climb the seven summits and they think, Oh… that's sort of embarrassing, it's selfish ….and so they say, I'm doing it because I'm retiring. We hide things that are ultimately good reasons.

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

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.

You become an entrepreneur, not by intent, but by accident. It may be that you see a need in a market and decide to act on it. Those for me are the true entrepreneurs- people that just start building, perhaps even without a plan, they just do it. Look at the most famous ones.... Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, they never went to shows or to training, they just got on with it.

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.

Focus is critical when you are building a business. The whole NFT industry is moving incredibly quickly. What happens in a month in the crypto-world, may take a couple of years in other industries.

Co-Founder and CEO of OpenSea, leading NFT marketplace platform

You could take a sword from one game and move it to another. In the events industry, you can imagine having event tickets operating as these collectible, persistent, immutable objects you can carry between markets, with different benefits… potentially even being redeemable against real-world assets.

Co-Founder and CEO of OpenSea, leading NFT marketplace platform

Today, American capital markets are a detriment for competitiveness. The private markets are doing well, but we need a new way forward for competitiveness that works better for companies and the people.

Management theorist & former Dean of Rotman School of Business

The only way to innovate is to follow Aristotle's prescription. To create a future that is different to the past is to imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made, not the one for which there is the most data. If companies want to innovate, they need to realise that data analytics is killing innovation yet is lauded and used increasingly.

Management theorist & former Dean of Rotman School of Business

The biggest mistake is thinking that some people at the top make strategy, while everybody else executes it. It feels intractable at this point, it's so ingrained in our way of thinking. You don't want people who sit there faithfully executing strategy, you want people who lead their part of the organisation and who engage in good communication.

Management theorist & former Dean of Rotman School of Business