How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers

The only reason we would go into a new sector is if we felt it was being badly run by other people. The reason we went into trains was that the government were running trains. British Rail had dilapidated trains, miserable service, and we felt we could go in, get fantastic new rail stock, motivate the staff, and we could make a big difference. I th

So what does it mean if you want to get speed in a big company? Not just a little start-up—we’re 350,000 people. So, we set about it in a couple of fundamental ways. One is we’ve built design thinking. In fact, we have thirty-two labs around the world. We’ve hired every design graduate there is on this planet. And the idea is that everything you us

We’re a marketing company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.

“I have always had the viewpoint that every situation is a learning opportunity.… People say to me, ‘When you hire people now, what do you look for?’ and I will say one of the biggest traits I look for is curiosity.”

“Hollywood will portray a leader as tall and handsome and strong-jawed. A lot of times, the real good leaders are just the opposite. First of all, they’ve got to want it. But they come in all shapes and sizes.”

You need to be working two or three years in advance.

So at the dinner table, virtually every day, she would sit down and have this conversation about “Give me a speech as if you were the president.” One day it would be prime minister, one day it would be chief minister, and she would always critique us. She would never give us a compliment. She would just tell us: “No chief minister would do this, no

“When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart.”

That whole period is very interesting, because the stock is not the company and the company is not the stock. As I watched the stock fall from $113 to $6, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics, number of customers, profit per unit, everything you could imagine. Every single thing about the business was getting better, and fast.