Wisdom in fragments

People have always been entrepreneurs, what's changed is connectivity. We can now relate to people all over the world and get to market really quickly. You could generate traffic in 24 hours, and sell within a week. It's incredible.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

The most common is deferring action and getting stuck in paralysis... The second most common is finance... Investing too much in unproven concepts for example. People can, and should, start their businesses as micro-enterprises to test their concepts and reduce risks.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

One of the things I'm interested in encouraging people to think about is the whole area of risk. What really is risky?! In many ways I think it's actually much safer to take things into your own hands rather than trusting your destiny to an uncertain jobs market.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

I think it's about usefulness! People talk of 'following your passion' but there are plenty of things people are passionate about that nobody will pay them money for, so you can't just tell someone to just follow their passion. The missing piece? usefulness... We say the magic formula is: Passion + Usefulness = Success.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

Imagine you have to walk through a field that has a few land mines scattered through it. If you walk through it and nothing happens, it seems there is no danger. If you walk across it enough times, you'll step on a landmine. Traditional risk management simply fails to account for the fact that the most dangerous risks are those which occur infrequently and don't show up in track-records.

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

More money has been lost on the mismeasurement of risk than not having risk management at all. The battle is not won through being attuned to risk control. If your measurement of risk is completely wrong, it could be worse than having nothing in place.

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

If you asked most people to categorise good trades and bad trades, you would find the answers to be quite simple… If it makes money it's a good trade, and if it loses money, it's a bad trade. That's not true at all… There's a very simple test to see whether something was a good or bad trade. You have to ask the question: 'If I was faced with the exact same information and circumstances again, would I still make the same trade?'. If the answer is yes, then it was not a bad trade.

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

The diversity of strategies people use is truly remarkable, I saw people using completely different strategies to the degree that if I had set out to invent 15 different strategies for a fictional work…. I couldn't have made the strategies more different to the ones I saw in real life! This illustrates a point I have made in all my works insofar as there really is no 'holy grail' or single style that is most effective.

Author of Market Wizards & Hedge Fund Expert

most of the half-trillion dollars received by Africa since the 1960s has funded military coups and civil wars, not economic development. Between 1982 and 1985, Zimbabwe spent $1.3 out of $1.5 billion of foreign assistance on arms and ammunition.

Economist and author specializing in terrorism financing and shadow economy

what turns a developing into a developed nation is not the amount of foreign aid it attracts, but how the money is spent.

Economist and author specializing in terrorism financing and shadow economy

For the societies themselves, this activity drains hard currency reserves, heightens inflation, reduces tax collection, curtails government service and undermines investment. There is no good accomplished by this massive outflow of resources.

We estimate that in talking about the cross-border flows of illicit money the component that is due to corruption- i.e. bribery and theft by government officials, is around 3-5% of the global total. It is very much the smaller part of the equation.

We're talking about massive amounts of money that have been shifted from poorer countries to richer ones. Almost all of this constitutes a permanent outward transfer. In our estimate, only about 10-20% of global illicit money ever finds its way back into the country of origin.

We measure these flows entirely based on data filed by governments at the World Bank and the IMF. We apply two very established economic models. One is the World Bank's residual method, and the other is the IMF Direction of Trade statistical approach. These models have been used by economists for decades but we were the first group to apply these models to all developing countries.

Architecture should fulfil multiple criteria. One of its purposes is to itself. A lot of people believe to some degree, in the autonomy of architecture as a discipline which means that part of the purpose of architecture is to construct new forms of knowledge that relate to the enhancement and advancement of the discipline.

Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design & Architecture Theorist

That's a very simple yet complicated question. Architecture exists to create the physical environment in which people live. Obviously that's a very simple answer, but if we deep digger we see the complexities. What is the built environment? what constitutes quality of life? how do architects determine whether something is positive, helpful or relevant for individuals and collectives?