China for example, aims to increase their buying by 400,000 barrels a day in the last quarter of 2012, and will be adding over 750,000 barrels of new refining capacity. That economic engine is still turning.

I went from knowing the value of a dollar to forgetting the difference between $10,000 and $30,000 because everything was expensive. I certainly I got hoodwinked sometimes: people would Google me and the business and charge me astronomical prices.

Consider for instance that the bulk of the world's foreign exchange reserves – trillions of dollars – are held by developing economies, and that the US runs a current account and budget deficit of astronomical proportions.

Humans often come together by believing in ideas that may only exist in our imaginations. 50 years ago, talking to somebody on the other side of the world with a device that fits in your hand, walking on the moon, or sending a rocket to Pluto would have been beyond our realities and could only have been possible with magic.

In the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, we observe a consequential 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. In the Autumn, when we gain an hour, we see a corresponding 21% reduction in heart attacks.

Before we came to market, everything in retail was about how cheaply you could pay your employees- and unfortunately, particularly women. There was an attitude in retail that said, '... well, your female employees are just going to get married, have children at 23 and leave, so why invest in them?' The reality of the world was that 60% of university graduates were women- and most women were having children later, entering professional careers.

The digital world has democratized content – it's now available on every platform all the time – and we're going to see a whole raft of new stars, because talent can be rewarded.

What is especially compelling for us at Nissan with Formula E is that developing these cars generates a wealth of technical insights that benefit the future of electric vehicles—and vice versa. The flexibility inherent in electrification technology allows for a robust exchange of learnings between the sport and our core business.

The single best way to have a great idea is to produce lots of ideas. The number of new ideas your organization can produce is a metric for its ability to generate novel solutions to any given problem. Your ideaflow is the most crucial business metric that you've never considered.

In a certain sense, when things become ubiquitous, they also become 'invisible'. The process of connection has become much less visible, so that the feeling of 'my computer' 'connecting' to 'the Internet' has changed to a feeling that my computer is the Internet.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than we are. This image- of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelganger- is so haunting because it is at least partly true.