From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
As I see it, education that strengthens our inclination toward the good is the means toward creating decent behavior in humans. Such education should be of the formal kind and through role modeling and osmosis.
A lot of business leaders were watching all this and seeing it as a warning call… they felt that they had to figure out how to operate better or risk losing their operating license.
Humans are now more numerous than any large land animal ever to walk the Earth, and the combined weight of our fleshy biomass outstrips that of most other larger animals put together, with the single exception of our own livestock.
There's only so much our world will become richer by surrounding ourselves with clones of ourselves!
We're no longer just measuring ourselves against the 120 members of our local community. Instead, with our devices, we're exposed to global icons like Bill Gates, Oprah, or LeBron James, setting standards for our intelligence, beauty, and self-worth. This expanded comparison can be detrimental.
As a nation, we're missing out by not being more flexible, accommodating and encouraging and I think lockdown has- at least- brought about that one piece of positive change.
We have a very strange relationship with empire, a combination of selective amnesia and nostalgia. The amnesia comes from the fact we mostly identify as the nation that won World War 2 not as the nation which had the greatest empire in human history. That helps us forget that there was at least a century where we were quite massively white supremacist and sometimes genocidal.
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.
Increasingly heavy-handed purges of crime will simply move perpetrators into different industries, increase the severity of crime, or create extremist groups. There is very little more dangerous in the world than individuals with nothing to lose.
If Smith were alive today, he'd say that in addition to the openness and competition and all the wealth we are creating, we need a sense of mutual sympathy and empathy. We need to give people the ability to compete.
Cinema and drama are also changing perceptions in India. This certainly happened with Made in Heaven which was commercially entertaining, but had a main character who was Gay. It blew everyone away and started an important conversation which was really encouraging.
Iceland, a country of just 332,000 people, managed to qualify among the 32 teams for FIFA. In contrast, India, with its billion-plus population, was nowhere in the picture. It made me realize that someone has to initiate change. While it's not a single person's job, someone needs to make a start. I firmly believe that beyond a certain point, money should serve society.