Business

You don't want to go into a negotiation thinking you will do A, B & C to get to D… you want to think about your goal – negotiation is not about reaching agreement, it's about meeting your objective as best as possible.

Negotiation expert and co-director of Harvard's Program on Negotiation

Negotiation is really a life skill, and it's essential in this day and age.

Negotiation expert and co-director of Harvard's Program on Negotiation

I've done a few very-right things in my life that I'm proud of, and one of them was getting to know Joey and bringing him into the business. Joey was a gift, and we knew we shouldn't miss out on him.

At most gyms, if you don't show up, nobody cares, and that's the truth. I love gyms, but if you don't show up, nobody will call you, nobody cares, they just take your money and have one less body in the room. We were different, we cared, we wanted you to show up.

The oral care industry and oral products is mainly made out of three or four companies that control 90% of oral care products in the world. All multibillion-dollar, multinational companies. I don't think these companies are stupid. They are run by very intelligent people, but I think the premise has been wrong.

I had a brand who said to me 'You shouldn't name your book wonderhell, nobody is going to buy a book they don't know what the word on the front cover means', and I replied, anybody who's in wonderhell will know what that word means the second they see the word.

I spent 20 years in executive search, and I was hired by my clients to call 'the most successful people' in the world. Bold face names in bold face organisations. However it wasn't that hard, because despite all the success, which is why I was calling them, they were not very happy which is why they were calling me back.

We needed to shift the media economy off a dependence on online advertising, and we needed to change who the customer is. Both things are possible with paid subscriptions because it's trust rather than content that gets monetised.

What was broken in journalism was not a lack of demand for good stories nor a lack of journalists or the format of stories and distribution – the thing that was broken was the business model.

The things that get rewarded in those systems are things that provoke, divide and drive outrage – so we end up with a broken media economy that drives us all crazy and doesn't represent the best version of ourselves – that doesn't help us come to a common understanding of truth.

Most great sellers and leaders figure out the things they love about their job – what they would do for free – and set up the infrastructure to intentionally avoid the parts that force them to show up inauthentically.

People don't gravitate towards perfection. People like people like themselves. And that's another definition of 'selling,' when someone can see themselves in you.

Any time you are trying to influence somebody or get them to make a decision that's good for them you are selling. Whether you're selling a product, whether you're selling an idea, whether you're selling your child on whether they should eat their vegetables.

Inventor of the Steadicam camera stabilization system

Selling is about creating agency in the people that you are talking to so that they feel like they are part of the decision-making process. Selling is wanting to ask questions that you really want to know the answers to. Not ones that you have to ask.

We have lived through an era where success has been defined only in financial terms- leaving out any consideration of the impact of business on communities or the world. Just because accounting standards don't require you to measure certain things, doesn't mean those things aren't real.

Founder of Lotus Software & Digital Rights Pioneer

Most of the venture backed businesses, and venture capital firms, are a mirror-tocracy not a meritocracy! Senior executives are disproportionately drawn from a narrow stratum of society – in the US, this means Ivy-League Schools such as Stanford. They tend to be overwhelmingly white (and increasingly now Asian) but certainly overwhelmingly male.

Founder of Lotus Software & Digital Rights Pioneer