Wisdom in fragments

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.

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

Sometimes it doesn't matter if the other side doesn't care about fairness; provided you do, you explain what's going on. I'm now playing his game and I pick something that's arbitrary. And now it's arbitrary vs. arbitrary versus principle versus arbitrary.

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

The first thing I'd say is a big mistake is not caring about what the other side wants. Oftentimes people are thinking I have to say no to the other side. My goal is to say yes to them. It's to figure out what it is they want and give it to them.

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 and can we agree that that's our goal?'

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

I think people all the time, hide or lie about information that would be useful to share. If you think about somebody who's selling their business because they want to climb the seven summits and they think, Oh… that's sort of embarrassing, it's selfish ….and so they say, I'm doing it because I'm retiring. We hide things that are ultimately good reasons.

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

You have to keep your business in what Jeff Bezos calls day one state. You have to keep your business on its toes, you have to be high energy, and push your people and business to do better. Never let them fall into complacency, into a day two business state. They'd rather always keep them young, energetic, on their toes and hungry.

If you go into a business and see an organisational handbook... you're in trouble. When people spend too much time drawing up organisational rules and charts, they're spending less time with customers. Hierarchical structures are the death of flexibility, they are the death of agility and remove the distributed leadership needed to make business work.

You become an entrepreneur, not by intent, but by accident. It may be that you see a need in a market and decide to act on it. 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.

In the business world, we need to focus on the 4-Cs. Firstly, Customer. Secondly, Competition. Thirdly, Comfort. It doesn't matter how successful you are, how much market share you have, if you're in your comfort zone you will leave yourself exposed. Fourth, Courage. You have to be prepared to take tough decisions. Cowardice pushes the day of reckoning out, decisiveness brings it closer.

When you look at a business in trouble, the important thing is to understand where the trouble is coming from. Critically you need to know whether it's a restructuring or transformation. A restructuring is where you adjust structures to a reduced volume or revenue level, but in this case the business model is not broken. In transformations, you still restructure, but you are dealing with a potentially broken business model.

I have a deep fascination with the natural world, the problems that living creatures need to solve and how natural selection evolution by natural selection has solved those problems. When it comes to flight... It's all about physics... how you solve the problems raised by physics.

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

Our envy of birds certainly helped drive our will to fly, however I think Leonardo was probably held back by trying to emulate the flapping of birds; that doesn't work with human muscles. We had to free ourselves of the perception that you need to flap your wings.

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

Birds are not born with an innate genetically determined knowledge of constellations. What they do has been brilliantly shown in an experiment by Stephen Emlen. Birds learn when they're young to look at this night sky and learn which bits of the sky don't rotate.

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

We have angels in mythology which fly everywhere, we have fairies, we have myths like the Greek myth of Icarus. It does have a great hold over our imagination. I feel it's such a wonderful thing to be able to leave the tyranny of gravity to leave the ground and fly wherever you will.

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

Flight is a very quick way to get from A to B. It's also a very good way to escape from predators who are stuck on the ground. The question to be asked is why doesn't everybody fly?

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

My greatest fear is that we have learnt nothing. Individually, we have learnt that the longer your population lives healthy, the better off your economy will be.