People

I’m neither softly-softly nor the barking sergeant major in terms of my management approach. In fact, I think the secret of good leadership is being able to flex your style when necessary; sometimes you’ll need to encourage teams while other times you may need to hold people accountable.

Having a great customer proposition is key.

Home entertainment is changing. Downloading a movie to watch at home will eventually become popular but it’ll be five or ten years before you’re able to do it in the same time as you can currently download a song. At the moment the infrastructure just isn’t there.

Feedback from your customers gives you the fuel and the energy you need to remain focused and enthusiastic about what you’re doing. It can really spur you on.

I still go in to video stores just to see what all the competition are up to. It’s all very clandestine, very furtive, but it’s something that has to be done.

The worst movie I’ve ever seen has to be Alexander with Colin Farrell. What makes it worse is that I’ll never get those hours of my life back.

People in business shouldn’t confuse being liked with being respected. Sometimes you have to make pretty tough calls and if you simply focus on being liked you may find yourself shirking that responsibility.

I’m hardly frivolous with money but I did buy debentures for the rugby at Twickenham. They were about £6,000 each but it’s the best money I’ve ever spent.

I think it’s extremely healthy to have proper debate at work. You have to draw a distinction between a debate and an argument though. More often than not the latter tends to get personal while the former doesn’t.

Often the difference between success and failure is not the quality of the idea you start off with but just how well you execute it.

Indecision can wreck a business. If, for example, you just know someone isn’t going to fit in your organisation then you have to be decisive and take swift action. Similarly, if there’s an issue in a certain area you shouldn’t wait for three decimal places worth of data to turn up before you make your mind up. Just get on and fix it before it gets worse.

Offering great value, convenience and choice is one thing. Delivering on that promise is another. Lovefilm’s stellar growth over the last of couple of years suggests we’re doing that.

I like those people who set a vision for a business and then get everybody in their organisation to align themselves behind it. People like Jeff Bezos at Amazon or Michael Dell at Dell Computers, where I used to work. These are men who’ve taken an idea, really focused on it and had the drive to actually make it happen.

It’s my ultimate business goal to make Lovefilm into a FTSE-250 company and the way things are going at the moment I think it’s highly likely it’s going to happen.

I would love to think that Brad Pitt would play me, should someone ever decided to make a film of the Lovefilm story… but it would probably be Steve Martin.

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