“Status is kinetic. Those who have it can give it to those who don't. Anointment refers to these ritualistic events that can be major: in a biblical sense, you're anointed by a king and all sorts of good things follow. In modern life, you're anointed if you're admitted to and graduate from a prestigious university. But anointment also happens on a much smaller scale, many times a day.”
— Toby E. Stuart

The quote archive

Business

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

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.

— Andy Last

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.

— Andy Last

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.

— Marc Randolph

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.

— Marc Randolph

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.

— Marc Randolph

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

If a company doesn't have a purpose, I think they are wasting their life. Making money should be the result of helping people to build businesses.

— Daniel Lamarre

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

You cannot just say to people, 'oh be creative' and then there will be a waste of time. You have to be very clear in what you are looking for and listen to people.

— Daniel Lamarre

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

At Cirque, we never talk about diversity because we live diversity. We have people in our organisation coming from 80 different countries. I like to describe us as citizens of the world.

— Daniel Lamarre

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

There is no business without creativity. Creativity for me is the first condition to establish yourself as a leader in whatever you do in life.

— Daniel Lamarre

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

Sometimes it doesn't matter if the other side doesn't care about fairness; provided you do, you explain what's going on. Now it's arbitrary versus arbitrary versus principle versus arbitrary.

— Barry Nalebuff

Co-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor

What I like the most and essentially is never done is to start off a negotiation by talking about how you'll negotiate, what's the process going to be? And to say things like 'my goal in this negotiation is to reach an agreement with you in which we create a giant pie and split it evenly.'

— Barry Nalebuff

Co-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor

I think the people who are larger or those who have more resources like to think they're the ones who have greater power… and they have benefited from that illusion.

— Barry Nalebuff

Co-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor

People don't know what it is that they're negotiating over… If you don't, then it's hard to know if you've gotten a bad deal, a fair deal, or a great deal! That's going to lead us to the negotiation pie, and with the negotiation pie comes the extra value that negotiators create by coming together.

— Barry Nalebuff

Co-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor

A lot of negotiation is teaching people tricks or verbal games, as opposed to providing a framework for thinking about negotiation. People want to come up with a solution that's fair. But what they think of as fair is often proportional division, and that just arises because they don't really understand what they're negotiating over.

— Barry Nalebuff

Co-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor

As Carl von Clausewitz said, 'no plan survives first contact with the enemy.' It's not about having a plan, it's about planning. When you are in a fluid situation, things change, and you have to adapt quickly. You cannot freeze into inaction.

— Pepyn Dinandt

You become an entrepreneur, not by intent, but by accident. Those for me are the true entrepreneurs- people that just start building, perhaps even without a plan, they just do it. Look at the most famous ones…. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, they never went to shows or to training, they just got on with it.

— Pepyn Dinandt