Business

I looked at it and thought, 'How can something this simple be so compelling?' It was compelling enough for me to take time out of the Consumer Electronics Show to go back and play over and over. I mean, I was hooked from the first time I played it. I couldn't explain what was going on.

Tetris video game rights holder & Blue Planet Project founder

One of the most powerful business skills is the ability to listen, not just act. As entrepreneurs and business leaders, if we're going to focus on what truly matters, it starts with understanding what matters.

Founder and former CEO of Panera Bread Company

Too often, organizations become like frogs in boiling water—gradually losing their competitiveness because everyone is afraid to take risks. The short-term pain of taking a risk seems more daunting than the long-term consequences, even though the long-term pain could be the loss of competitive advantage and, ultimately, the entire value of the enterprise.

Founder and former CEO of Panera Bread Company

As a large company CEO, I believe one of the most critical roles is driving innovation and transformation. In fact, the CEO has to be the 'Discoverer in Chief.' Over time, a divide often forms between the discovery people and the delivery people. The language of discovery is imaginative and poetic—'imagine if,' 'what if we tried this?'—while the language of delivery is pragmatic and data-driven—'prove it to me,' 'show me the numbers.'

Founder and former CEO of Panera Bread Company

Being an entrepreneur, or even running a large organization, is like being a society builder. The system is bigger than any individual. You can take the same person, place them in different environments—like the old Soviet Union versus the UK or the US—and get completely different outcomes. It's about the system.

Founder and former CEO of Panera Bread Company

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?