“You've got around 2.6 billion people in the world who survive on less than $2 per day, 75% of them are rural and agriculture is their primary economic activity. Most are, however, mired in a form of subsistence farming that barely allows them to scrape-by.”
— William Foote
Unknown.

The quote archive

Technology

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

Once you're able to reduce the human element, and automate the reporting of these statistics- you will be greatly reducing the potential for misbehaviour. This is where regulators can leverage technology, reduce their burden.

— Andrew Lo

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

You are only ever one click away from looking at another alternative… The ability for the consumer to shop-around has made it difficult for some operators to realise the need for transparency in pricing… particularly when your product is built around opacity.

— Timothy O’Neil-Dunne

The consumer is far better educated today than he ever was. Consumers don't need to rely on intermediaries to tell them what is good or bad- people are social, they share information with friends and strangers, and go to a broader community for help and assistance.

— Timothy O’Neil-Dunne

The human species is different now to thirty years ago, we have an electronic extension to our DNA that gives so many distractions, so much multi-tasking, and so little time to focus on a single thought for any extended period of time.

— Tim Berry

Founder of Palo Alto Software and business planning expert

People also lose sight of the fact that technology driven globalisation has been extremely beneficial for a lot of people outside the US. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted above the poverty line in India, China, Africa and elsewhere.

— Prof. Steven Kaplan

University of Chicago finance professor specializing in private equity and leveraged buyouts

Technology, scale and globalisation has helped people involved in business- and led to increased incomes for many groups. The conundrum we have in society is that many of the 'less-skilled' members of the population have not done so well from these trends and that's part of the reason for backlash.

— Prof. Steven Kaplan

University of Chicago finance professor specializing in private equity and leveraged buyouts

We're taking capability from NASA that used to cost billions of dollars, and we're doing it for tens of millions of dollars. We want to learn that critical information necessary to develop those resources.

— Chris Lewicki

Water is the essence of life. On Earth it's used to grow plants and within industrial processes but in space it takes on a whole new form. We can use water as a radiation shield. One cubic metre of water gives the same protection as Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen- and that happens to be rocket fuel.

— Chris Lewicki

The design and collaborative power of an individual engineer or technologist is more powerful than it's ever been. The tasks themselves are getting more accessible too. Putting a robotic spacecraft out into space is becoming fairly routine.

— Chris Lewicki

Digital currency shows that anything can be money. We have become accustomed to see money as paper or pieces of gold, but in truth it could also be stones, grain, wood, cigarettes or complex computer codes.

— Bob Swarup

Despite huge and on-going technological advances in electronic transactions technologies, it has remained surprisingly durable, even if its major uses seem to be buried in the world underground and illegal economy.

— Kenneth Rogoff

Economist & Harvard Professor; Former IMF Chief Economist

To break into the chain, you would have to amass 25,000 of the world's fastest supercomputers. That seems completely infeasible. This is one of the big advantages of BitCoin – the ledger is practically unhackable.

— Prof. Campbell Harvey

Duke Finance Professor & Co-Developer of Campbell Harvey Market Timing Model

Unlike real money, they are decentralised and transactions are free; no bank in the middle taking their slice and nothing central to fail.

— Kate Craig-Wood

Crypto-currency is a means by which people can exchange property in a secure way without the use of a central institution like a bank or the Federal Reserve.

— Prof. Campbell Harvey

Duke Finance Professor & Co-Developer of Campbell Harvey Market Timing Model

I hesitate to respond bluntly but 'design' to many businesses is an invisible element somehow present without effort…like 'free wifi'. And, as my son says, to his generation, 'wifi is like air'––taken for granted and only notable when the quality is bad or (god forbid!) it is not there at all.

— Chris Bangle

BMW Chief Designer; Revolutionized Automotive Design Language in 2000s

Design is the great 're-configurer' of problems for business… for example design takes an engineering solution for transmitting signals called a phone and reconfigures it into a hyper complex problem of glass and metal shapes, etc.

— Chris Bangle

BMW Chief Designer; Revolutionized Automotive Design Language in 2000s