Colleagues should take care of each other, have fun, celebrate success, learn by failure, look for reasons to praise not to criticize, communicate freely and respect each other.
A company’s employees are its greatest asset and your people are your product.
Your employees are your company’s real competitive advantage. They’re the ones making the magic happen-so long as their needs are being met.
Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn’t you have fun at work?
The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them – preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.
Create the kind of workplace and company culture that will attract great talent. If you hire brilliant people, they will make work feel more like play.
I believe we will look back and be shocked at what was the accepted way we killed animals en masse for food.
As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy. Waking up stressed and miserable is not a good way to live.
Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.
Business isn’t about ties, suits and briefcases. It’s about adventure.
The best lesson I learned was to just do it. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how hard it might seem, as the ancient Greek, Plato, said, ‘The beginning is the most important part of any work.
Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I’ve done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin’s success. I am aware that the ideas of business as being fun and creative goes right against the grain of convention, and it’s certainly not how the they teach it at some of those business schools, where business means hard grind and lots of ‘discounted cash flows’ and net’ present values’.
If you opt for a safe life, you will never know what it’s like to win.
Listen – it makes you sound smarter.
You’re guaranteed to miss every shot you don’t take.
Whatever your goal is you will never succeed unless you let go of your fears and fly.
I believe that listening is one of the most important skills for any teacher, parent, leader, entrepreneur or, well, just about anyone who has a pulse.
Acquiring the habit of note-taking is therefore a wonderfully complementary skill to that of listening.
If only we had the power to see ourselves in the same way that others see us.’ Of all the mantras one might adopt in life, this is surely one of the better ones and for anyone in a leadership role it should be an essential part of the checks and balances that are built into a company’s standard operating procedures.
Live for the present –’ I heard my parents’ old maxim in the back of my head ‘– and the future will look after itself.