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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater. And I've just accepted the job of running The National Theatre in England, because I want to be able to say to myself, "The integrity of this enterprise is finally down to me." The buck stops right here in my lap. And it's not possible, it's not conceivable for me to say, "Well, what's happening on the stage at the moment is because it's his fault, or her fault, or their fault." It's my fault. Or it's my commitment, or it's my success, or it's pleasure or whatever.
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Joyce Carol Oates
National Book Award
I turn down invitations to do things for money. I have almost no interest in making money. Actually, I've acquired a fair amount of money that I will never live to spend. It's been earmarked for various charities and worthwhile places. So earning money, in a way, depresses me, because I feel it's just piling up. And there's just something melancholy about the image of money piling up that will never be drawn upon. I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.
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Pierre Omidyar
Founder and Chairman, eBay
If you think about it, commerce and trade is at the base of all human activity, and it's a bit of an exaggeration, but I like to talk about, you know, in the old days people would bring their stuff to market and they'd do business and then they'd go back to their hillside homes or wherever. And eventually they were doing this enough that you had to build a wall around them to protect them, and that was the birth of cities and so forth. And again, gross generalizations and simplifications, but fundamentally everything we do in human activities is related to trade and there's something, I think, that's wired in human beings that drives us to commerce. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but the human side. So that's the human side I'm referring to. With eBay it became apparent very quickly, because in order to do a trade -- a transaction with someone -- you actually have to get to know that person and build a trusting relationship first. So you have to build trust before you will enter into a transaction. And so in order to build trust you have to communicate. You have to get to know one another and so very quickly I started getting letters about -- actually some of the early letters were more negative. They were, you know, "This guy is a jerk," kind of thing, and I said, "Okay, there's some human element to that I wasn't expecting. Please be nice. You know, not everyone is a jerk. Maybe there's a misunderstanding. Give people the benefit of the doubt." But you know, so very, very quickly I learned that it was actually the human element that was really driving it more than the commerce. So that was very interesting.
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Pierre Omidyar
Founder and Chairman, eBay
Pierre Omidyar: I founded the company on the notion that people were basically good, and that if you give them the benefit of the doubt you're rarely disappointed. And I'm thankful that, in fact, statistics have borne that out to be true. And it is actually 99.999 percent of our transactions happen without a case of reported fraud. There are 30 cases out of every one million transactions where somebody actually goes to the trouble to report fraud, so presumably there's some unreported level as well that's higher than that and people don't bother. But that is -- there's no word to describe it. It's far more than a large majority or most, or whatever. I mean, it's practically all transactions happen without a problem. Now, as the absolute number of transactions have gone up -- this is another challenge that we faced -- is that the absolute number of problems has also gone up, and so with the attention that is paid on the company -- I mean, you can open the newspaper on any given day and read about the latest problem that's related to eBay somehow. Whether it's some kind of strange new item being offered on the site, or an illegal item or whatever. And so we've had to evolve our strategies and our policies from what I built in the beginning, which was a self-policing community of people, to one where we take a more active role in trying to help identify the bad actors. We work with the authorities to go find them and make sure they don't come back and this sort of thing.
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Pierre Omidyar
Founder and Chairman, eBay
If you think about a retail environment, where people are buying things in a retail environment, the retailer has a whole bunch of control. They choose the products. They design the store or the catalogue. They train the salespeople. They control the experience. And if there's a problem with a salesperson, they retrain and so on and so forth. At eBay, our customer's experience is based on how one customer interacts with another customer, okay, and you can't control customer behavior. So the only thing you can do is have a certain set of values that you encourage people to adopt, and the only way your customers are going to adopt those values is if they see that you're living those values as well. So when I say that I believe people are basically good, it's because I believe people are basically good. I mean, it's not something that I came up with for eBay. And if I say that you should treat people with the benefit of the doubt, it's because I believe in that as a way of life. And we have to do it internally at eBay at the company as well, because if we don't, then eventually that seeps through, and customers will see that and that will harm our business, because we can't control customer behavior. So our business is based on that.
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