Fear of what other people will think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life. The best moment of my lifewas the day I realized that I know longer give a damn what anybody thinks. That's enormously liberating and freeing, and it's the only way to live your life and do your business.

Fear of what other people will think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life. The best moment of my lifewas the day I realized that I know longer give a damn what anybody thinks. That's enormously liberating and freeing, and it's the only way to live your life and do your business.

My background is advertising: I moved to New York from London in 1998 to start up the U.S. office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

If I ran the world, I would find a way to bring the wealth of human good intentions and corporate good intentions together - to activate them collectively into shared action against shared objectives that produces shared hard, tangible results.

Despite their good intentions, today's businesses are missing an opportunity to integrate social responsibility and day-to-day business objectives - to do good and make money simultaneously.

My personal cause and platform, if you like, is women's rights and women's issues.

The single biggest lesson I learned was when a hire isn't working out fire them fast. My biggest mistakes, and where I've seen the worst results, were when I gave someone too many chances, or let a situation drift on for too long because I couldn't bring myself to terminate it.