From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
written word is the base of culture, the spine. The other limbs and torso that attach to the spine, still depend upon the spine. Without the written word, there can be no other form of communication….
Complex societies needed repetitive rituals in order to get off the ground. Routinizing rituals makes deviations from the standard script easy to detect. And this means that when people step out of line, they can be sanctioned.
At Cirque, we never talk about diversity because we live diversity. We have people in our organisation coming from 80 different countries. I like to describe us as citizens of the world.
Our entire civilisation is a manifestation of the complex inner worlds we carry with us. Everything around us, our buildings, cultures, politics, economies, statues, art and music are reflections of who we were, are and want to be.
What novels do is to turn the tide and restore our individuality. The writer is alone when s/he is writing, the reader is alone when s/he is reading. This bond is precious.
It's taken for me to get into my 30s to realise I am more than the media told me I was- I have more to say, so do my friends. We are intelligent, we are strong, we are multi-faceted, we are vulgar and we are funny.
Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners.
Throughout my career, my vision for the company has not changed – creating an institution. I find this the most challenging task, not just getting in the sales and growing year on year but creating an institution that is considered part of the family by those within it.
If you want a caricature, life satisfaction is your self‑smugness rating—how smug you feel about your life. Western smugness has definitely slid over the past ten years.
You can have many great actors but you have very few who really become movie stars. It is that indefinable quality of someone who becomes iconic that people want to come and watch regardless of the type of film they're in.
Culture is not aspirational, it's observational. It's not something you and your co-founders sit down, dream-up, put into PowerPoint, and create some posters from, for the break-out room. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.
The reality is that you are looking at your private emails and Facebook and so on at work, and at home you will look at your work emails. We split our private life and work life in a different way than we did in the past. Now, these areas of our lives are totally mixed together.