Business

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.

When it comes to the growth of knowledge, you need to double down on the capacities you already have; you want to build on cities that possess a foundation. When you build in a remote location, costs skyrocket, attractiveness is hard to engineer, and the complementarities that help knowledge stick to a place simply aren't there.

Physicist & Director of MIT Media Lab Connection Science group

Don't give away a majority shareholding the way I had to with HomeServe. I ended up giving away 52% of the shares with my partner for a £500,000 investment we took when we'd run out of money—a terrible time to raise capital.

You absolutely need some funding to get started. But ideally, that should come from remortgaging your house or borrowing a bit from friends, family, or parents—just enough to have a small amount of money, but not too much. That way, you can copy, pivot, test, learn, and prove out your model on a small scale.

I think people need to understand that building a business is really, really difficult. That shouldn't put anyone off, but there's no easy road to riches.