My philosophy was that I never had focus groups.

Women in my focus groups, they say a bald man is trustworthy. He has nothing to hide.

To me the cynics are the ones in the boardrooms with the reports from the focus groups.

The growing influence of focus groups means we are all in danger of being excessively cowed by their feedback.

Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups.

While the other parties look at polls and focus groups to decide what they stand for, and pander to every special interest group, we follow our principles.

I don't have any focus groups on talent and programming. If I need five people in a mall to be paid $40 to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn't do my job.

In the old world, people used to have to go to focus groups and ask people what they thought. Now, people are writing all over the Web what they think about things.

Big-time directors and the studios that bankroll them prefer to dwell in the comfortable, familiar center, where mammon is God and the only divine word comes from focus groups.

In life, you know, they do this in focus groups; if you were in such and such circumstance, what would you do? Well, you never know what you're going do unless you're faced with it.

When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, 'Who are these people? Why should we watch them?

This party will not take its position based on public opinion polls. We will not take a stand based on focus groups. We will not take a stand based on phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other vagaries of pubic opinion.

By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.

Most people who are on the inside of a technology have no idea what it's like to look at from an end user's point of view. This is why they have focus groups. I'm really familiar with this because I worked 10 years for Hallmark Cards in the U.S.

When we started NFL Films, there were no focus groups, there were no demographic studies, there were no surveys. Every decision that we made, we made with our hearts, not with our heads. And, in the very beginning, we really didn't even have a business plan.

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.

The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.

Run focus groups. Do whatever you need to do to get 8 to 10 people together in a room and put your product in front of them. Ask them how much they would pay for it and whether they would pay for it. It's really important to get user validation early and often.

My career, I look at it in a Darwinian framework. I'm going to do exactly what I want, and I'm going to survive, or I'm not. I'm not going to pander. I'm not going to change things. I'm not going to do focus groups. I'll live and die by the sword. I don't care. Because I couldn't live with myself.

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