Business

My goal was simply attracting large numbers of customers because mass appeal guarantees profit. I often advised not to obsess over immediate profits but to prioritise popularity. Like Amazon or Apple, success comes from creating something that garners mass recognition and love.

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.

You can make a vision real. You can make a vision for a product real, or an experience. A place where you can get really, really good food, really quickly, made by people who really care.

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

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

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

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.

A lot of entrepreneurs don't make that switch. They cling to that brand identity of 'I'm an innovator,' still tinkering with the product while everyone else is saying, 'Hey, it's good enough — let's hire our first salesperson.'

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.

Your brain has an agenda: to make you feel good about you. So if you're the CEO, and you decided to launch a product two weeks ago, your brain assumes, 'Well, that must have been the right decision.' It starts scanning the environment for proof — cherry-picking anything that confirms you were right.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

The industrial age was designed around one group of people making decisions, and a different group carrying them out. That mindset still lingers in our language — 'leaders' and 'followers,' 'blue collar' and 'management,' 'union' and 'executive.' It splits the world into thinkers and doers. That no longer works.

Former Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!

Status hierarchies help us navigate choices which would otherwise be impossibly complex. It dramatically reduces the cognitive load we face in making decisions.

People who come in through the games engage more with the news and other content — and ultimately become more valuable subscribers overall. Gaming becomes the entry point that leads them into the broader New York Times ecosystem. It's been so successful that they've actually flipped their old saying. Back in the 1940s, the Times used to say, 'People come for the news and stay for the games.' Now it's the other way around.

Companies and organisations need to understand and embrace gaming in its totality. Gamification is just one small element — a subset — of what a true gaming strategy entails. To me, it's something that should be an integral part of how companies think about their consumer or customer engagement strategy.

The mindset shift has to be from those one-off activations to seeing gaming as a holistic, integral part of your overall strategy — something that's always on, like social media. Because think about it: as a brand, there's never a day when you go, 'Well, today we're not doing anything on social.' That just doesn't happen, right? The same mindset needs to apply to gaming.