Leadership

We compete not to just make up the numbers, but to do it right, with a full programme to achieve success on the track and meet all our other measures of success, too.

When you shift from a personal attribution for not knowing—thinking, 'I don't know, but everyone else seems to, so I'll fake it or avoid the situation'—to a universal attribution—realizing, 'I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows'—you stand taller. This allows you to embrace what I believe is the most successful mindset: confident uncertainty.

Harvard psychologist & researcher in mindfulness and the psychology of possibility

Conflict resilience is the capacity to sit with the discomfort of disagreement in the first place. It's a leadership quality that integrates various skills, most notably genuine, curious listening and effective assertion—the ability to articulate one's experience authentically in a way that isn't avoidant but increases the likelihood of being heard.

Director of Stanford Law School's Negotiation and Mediation program

Just because a decision doesn't work out doesn't mean it was the wrong decision. If it was based on the best available information at the time, it was still a sound choice.

What's unique about Stoic Capitalist is that I aimed to shift those ideas from mere coping to succeeding on a much larger scale. At its core, Stoicism as a coping mechanism involves reining in emotion and distinguishing between what you can and cannot control.

I don't believe there's a universal formula for success—I can only share what worked for me, which was driven by enthusiasm for new ideas. What I value most in people is enthusiasm—not passion, which I find overused—but genuine enthusiasm to see opportunities and act upon them.

Every business, in a way, is about harmony. If you don't have that sense of harmony and alignment in the pursuit of excellence and the vision, it's going to be tricky.

Founder of Pret A Manger, British fast-food entrepreneur and businessman

Let me be clear: 90% of what people like I do is about failure. I embrace failure every single day. It's not bad. In the pursuit of excellence, clearly every day is going to involve failure.

Founder of Pret A Manger, British fast-food entrepreneur and businessman

It is vital that you never, ever, ever stop pursuing excellence. And that is elusive. It's very elusive. It calls for a lot of honesty. A lot.

Founder of Pret A Manger, British fast-food entrepreneur and businessman

It's about the pursuit of a vision. It's about being brutally honest each day. It's about truly understanding the role of housekeeping versus the relationship with your customer.

Founder of Pret A Manger, British fast-food entrepreneur and businessman

Unless you learn and grow continuously, you're probably going to end up as one of the 90% who don't make it.

When these people are under stress, they make bad decisions. They get reactive. One of the key findings in our conclusions is that the unsuccessful founders were more reactive. They weren't measured. They weren't deliberate. They didn't make decisions based on facts — their emotions carried them away.

Rich, sometimes you treat a wisp of intuition as though it were a four-lane highway. It's not that you shouldn't trust intuition — it's that you need to validate it.

The skills that get them to one point won't carry them the rest of the way. We talk about the ticking time bomb. The ticking time bomb is these very characteristics — when you're trying to scale, and things are getting more complex, and you have to work through other people — they blow up.

That confidence and perseverance can sometimes lead you to keep charging ahead headfirst, when what's really needed is a pause and a course adjustment. I think that's the challenge when strengths get overused.

What really matters is how well you know yourself — because every aspect of your leadership is expressed through your personality. I think that single trait — self-awareness — or rather, that skillset, outweighs all the others put together.