Business

Managing in the age of outrage is not the same as managing outrage. Managing outrage is crisis management—you can turn it over to a part of the organization that's pro at it and then get on with your day. It's firefighting.

If you're managing that way in the age of outrage, basically you're saying your organization will be in constant firefighting mode. That's unsustainable. The organization will very quickly wither and die.

Well credit, as you say, makes the world go around, but we want the right amount of credit. Too little credit and the economy can't grow, too much credit and the economy becomes unstable and we have the great financial crisis. So we need to find that proper Goldilocks point in the middle.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

If you make everything you do data driven, it's an inherent limitation on experimentation. Most PLCs are so driven by the finance department that they've lost the capacity to get lucky.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist

If you benchmark on everything, you simply become more similar to your competitors and move into a red ocean space which is highly, highly, brutally competitive. There's only room for one, maybe two at most, cost-cutting businesses.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist

The average is the enemy of the marketer, because it actually disguises what you really need to know, which is the outliers, the unusual use cases, the anecdotal eccentricity, where most of the really valuable information lies.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist

The miracle of capitalism is that if you have a central government trying to solve something, it will come up with one averagely optimal solution for everybody. And capitalism will come up with 10 different solutions to the same problem.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist

The problem with market research is that people don't think what they feel, don't say what they think, and don't do what they say.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist

A fantastic business stumbles onto something psychological which just gives it a fantastic edge. Netflix's killer psychological hack was 'have 3 DVDs at any one time, watch them as often as you want, change them out as often as you want, £19.95 a month. No late fees ever.' That turned into a business worth billions.

Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & advertising strategist and behavioral economist

Look at Jeff Bezos telling his 1.5 million employees to 'wake up every morning terrified and stay terrified all day.' They're not getting rich; they're barely scraping by. Yet he wants them living in terror so he can get even richer. That's crazy. That's a crazy society and a crazy life.

Life Coach, Author & Sociologist Known for Self-Acceptance Work

Risk naturally triggers fear—fear of a bad outcome. But using reason to manage risk means applying a more analytical approach, almost like a mathematical assessment of risk and reward. If the odds are against you, how bad is the downside really?

My goal was simply attracting large numbers of customers because mass appeal guarantees profit. I often advised not to obsess over immediate profits but to prioritise popularity. Like Amazon or Apple, success comes from creating something that garners mass recognition and love.

Take any product and change the identity of the person or entity associated with it, and you fundamentally change how the world interprets and values that product. The product itself is 100% identical—it hasn't changed at all. What has changed is the identity, and in particular, the status of the person attached to it.

In markets like books, art, music, and Hollywood, it's extremely hard to predict which products will become runaway hits. In the early days, if a high-status person embraces a product, it can have an enormous impact on its trajectory. Influential people adopt and endorse a product, which gives it an initial push.

There is an honest trade-off between labour market protection and learning. If you have an extremely static labour market—like the high protection laws in France or Spain—you get stability, but you sacrifice learning. There is less transfer of knowledge because there is less reallocation of people to tasks or teams.

Director of MIT Media Lab; expert in network science and complexity

The number one thing is misread intentions. You assume someone has ill intent toward you—maybe to hurt you, harm you, or make you feel uncomfortable—and you don't check in on those intentions. Then a narrative forms in your head, and that's when you start spiralling. You can apply this to your children, to relationships, and it happens constantly at work.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption