Insights on How to Succeed in Business

I ran across this fascinating article interviewing various business CEOs about how they succeed at doing things better than anyone else.

It strikes me as a fair question to ask economic developers who run highly successful economic development programs or organizations. Wouldn't that be interesting?

I like this response by Bob McKnight from Quicksilver about how to keep a brand cool. "You constantly have to rejuvenate yourself and your business. You have to find young, smart, passionate, innovative, creative thinkers who want to work hard. Your design staff has to hang out where kids hang out and make sure that they're on point with product. They have to read all of the fashion magazines. They have to be on trend with colors and fit. You are really relying on your designers to align themselves with you and be innovative and intuitive all the time.

Anybody can market, anybody can put an ad in Surfer magazine -- whatever. You have to have the right athletes, the right environment, the right events, the right projects. You have to be innovative and new all the time in your marketing. Abercrombie can make as good a short as us, so why buy us instead of Abercrombie? Because we have history and heritage, and we align with cool and we're cutting-edge, we're innovative, we're progressive, and all of those things come to mind when someone sees Quiksilver."

What does this say about keeping cool cities cool, or making a not so cool city cooler?