From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Entrepreneurial businesses innovate, change, evolve and meet customer needs… it's about creating things that people value and love.
What I like the most and essentially is never done is to start off a negotiation by talking about how you'll negotiate, what's the process going to be? And to say things like 'my goal in this negotiation is to reach an agreement with you in which we create a giant pie and split it evenly.'
You don't want to go into a negotiation thinking you will do A, B & C to get to D… you want to think about your goal – negotiation is not about reaching agreement, it's about meeting your objective as best as possible.
I have not been an urban investor in re-gentrification, which tries to change the character of a community and, candidly, is very speculative. Instead I look at revitalisation, which constitutes investing in existing densely populated and ethnically diverse communities and delivering the goods and services that are sought after but not provided.
If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.
Pinpoint accuracy isn't as significant as one might think. A reasonably good estimate can still greatly assist in managing these environmental issues far better than not attempting to calculate it at all.
At most gyms, if you don't show up, nobody cares, and that's the truth. I love gyms, but if you don't show up, nobody will call you, nobody cares, they just take your money and have one less body in the room. We were different, we cared, we wanted you to show up.
The most critical element is the cultural integration. The distinct cultures of the two companies present a significant challenge, consuming 80-90% of our efforts. Our goal is to forge a unified team culture, permeating from senior leadership to the deepest levels.
Most every decision that your team will make is independent of you as a leader. Once in a while, they may update you or ask you a question, but the vast majority of decisions are made either individually, or inside teams- and if those individuals and teams don't know what that end-game truly looks like, the odds of them making the right decision at any moment in time diminishes.
I'm extremely proud of the fact that we have driven social and cultural change. I have always wanted women to be empowered, and we've given them that opportunity. At the beginning, we said our events were going to be for women only, it enabled women to talk to each other about their sex lives in private, in a safe and unintimidating environment, and that was part of women's sexual empowerment as a movement.
Well, do you remember those Venn Diagrams from school? Those overlapping circles to represent what two things do and don't have in common? The overlap of these two is incredibly fertile territory and this is exactly where businesses in the U.S. and UK see each other – places where they both need to do business and want to do business.
BE CONSISTENT across your communication – what your values are, what you're trying to do – it's super obvious but without a single clear proposition that you communicate consistently at every contact point, you can't expect to grow an audience that believes in you.