Business

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're sourcing trainers from sweatshops, those sweatshops can be filmed on a mobile phone and that can go viral in hours, destroying shareholder value. There are no dark-corners in which supply chains can hide anymore.

Leaders cannot delegate social mission to 'somewhere else' in the business. There's pressure coming from the digital world, from shareholders, investors, workforce and government. Leaders can no longer afford for social mission to be done on the side; it has to be built into the core model.

The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

Culture is not aspirational, it's observational. It's not something you and your co-founders sit down, dream-up, put into PowerPoint, and create some posters from. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

When you start- the thing that you start with is almost never the thing that becomes successful. Lo-and-behold, in April 1998, when we finally launched this company – they were right, it didn't work, it was a terrible idea.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer