From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you look historically at the historical contours of wealth- it's primarily created through private ownership. That's always been the case- and I believe it always be.
Hedge funds give less transparency than almost anything that people invest money in... Since investors have accepted much less transparency and much less attractive terms in liquidity and information rights, they have not been able to pick apart the sources of return.
Selling is about creating agency in the people that you are talking to so that they feel like they are part of the decision-making process. Selling is wanting to ask questions that you really want to know the answers to. Not ones that you have to ask.
Social media has decreased distance and that means that we are just as passionately bothered about things on the other side of the world, as we are things in our home town. Social media transparency has had, and is having, a huge impact on stakeholder visibility.
It's about creating legal accountability around the creation of value for stakeholders, not just shareholders. That's what changes the conversation in the boardroom.
Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained.
Status hierarchies help us navigate choices which would otherwise be impossibly complex. It dramatically reduces the cognitive load we face in making decisions.
Transformation is about understanding how the market is evolving and positioning your organization for the future that's unfolding. It's about ensuring that you're there when that future arrives.
Taking that first step is your biggest competitive advantage; most people won't do it.
The diversity of strategies people use is truly remarkable, I saw people using completely different strategies to the degree that if I had set out to invent 15 different strategies for a fictional work…. I couldn't have made the strategies more different to the ones I saw in real life! This illustrates a point I have made in all my works insofar as there really is no 'holy grail' or single style that is most effective.
Rather than the emerging markets, or weaker economies, this problem originated in the most sophisticated and advanced financial markets because those are the markets where leverage was the greatest and people took the most advantage of it.
Following the crisis, nobody actually pinpointed its cause and hence where the deficiencies were. There were knee-jerk reactions to say hedge-funds caused it with leverage, they're bad and must be regulated…. but nobody looked at the fact that the market created a load of products that nobody understood, and then failed to manage them properly.