“As a leader, you also realise that calm is contagious. It doesn't matter how you feel inside, if you can portray calm- your people will be calm.”
— Robert J. O’Neill
Former SEAL Team Six member who shot Osama bin Laden

The quote archive

Business

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

If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.

— Robert E. Siegel

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained.

— Robert E. Siegel

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

You can't stay in your lane anymore – you need to be good at multiple things, and understand interactions.

— Robert E. Siegel

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

In a world where everything is connected, there's bits and bytes moving, and leaders need to understand what happens when functions inside a company interact. What happens when your company is interacting with others inside of its ecosystem? There's a flow to business and leaders need to be able to see that flow.

— Robert E. Siegel

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

The physical world isn't going away. We are a physical species. While digitisation is enabling incredible things – the best companies seem to be combining the physical and digital; they seem to understand what it means when products and services are connected.

— Robert E. Siegel

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

When you love what you do, when you're excited about your field, when you've chosen a path that connects with you personally- you will learn fast, you will accomplish in 5 years what it would take others 15 years to do.

— Robert Greene

Author of "The 48 Laws of Power" & Strategist

Winning is satisfaction. When you are working hard with your team, when you are working day and night, fighting hard, doing the best you can… when you make sacrifices and see things start to grow. That feeling of satisfaction is more important sometimes than money.

— Renzo Rosso

Founder and Chairman of Diesel fashion brand and Only The Brave Group

There is a problem with business leaders and the economics profession where we have celebrated the gains from neoliberal policies whilst only paying lip-service to compensating those left-behind.

— Glenn Hubbard

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

In these political times, that's more difficult, you must plant your flag somewhere, and someone will get upset. You have to be able to take that in your stride.

— Joe Zammit-Lucia

We're starting to realise that business is a major force in deciding the sort of society we live in- and so the role of business must be more in tune with political, social and moral norms of the day.

— Joe Zammit-Lucia

Running a business is a challenging job, but until relatively recently, that job was simplified to the extent that you had one target – make as much money as you can for the shareholders. Now, you have to balance a multitude of targets which makes it much more challenging.

— Joe Zammit-Lucia

We need a change from managers to leaders. We need people who can understand the political and moral structure of their companies, and who can motivate and bring people to go in the direction of those values. That's true leadership.

— Joe Zammit-Lucia

We really overvalue work, and undervalue fun, play and life. We've made work our highest calling and made hours worked rather than output the key performance indicator.

— Joe Sanok

Founder of Practice of the Practice & Mental Health Business Consultant

This isn't about shareholders becoming like Greenpeace but realising that return on investment requires you to understand your risks and that requires you to understand, and act on, your relationship with society.

— Andy Last

Your social mission has to genuinely deliver for society and genuinely deliver for business. If your social mission isn't rooted in delivering for the business, it simply isn't going to last.

— Andy Last

Today's workers don't want their own reputation soiled by working for a company that doesn't have a good reputation. They want to feel their work has meaning, and the companies they work for have a purpose.

— Andy Last