From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Entrepreneurship means a constant willingness to keep learning. It's about maintaining that start-up spirit—where you're forever young, and forever in crisis. It's about always having your mind on the business: Lying in bed and constantly asking yourself, What should I do?
We have to create systems that make people think twice before they behave badly. People need to credibly believe that there will be consequences to their actions if caught in random stings. If you are in a position where you are uniquely able to wield power- politics, police, corporate leadership- you should be randomly subject to attempts to see if you behave badly when offered the opportunity to do so.
So much of silence is about perpetuating the status quo, reinforcing what someone or dominant groups within an entity or organization have deemed appropriate, good, polite. Being different inherently exposes you to vulnerability; you're pushing against everything that the forces of mimicry urge you to do, which is to conform.
I've always felt negotiation is pretty-easy. You have to look at any situation from the perspective of all sides, and find a zone of fairness in between.
So, without thinking it through, I got a tourist visa and flew to Moscow. I didn't consider the repercussions or how risky it could be—I just did it. If Stein could go to Moscow, so could I. Others had gone there, and I knew tourists were allowed. So I went as a tourist, and we'd figure things out from there.
To change motivation, it is important to give hope and make people believe. But also to give concrete results. It is important to value the positive instead of only highlighting the worst.
Unlike the divisive silos we've constructed, where one generation accuses the other — the older labeling the younger as lazy and the younger dismissing the older as out-of-touch or rigid. This dynamic needs transformation. Moving forward, it's imperative that both boomers and zoomers work in tandem.
Participants in each market, faced with threats, had to put competitive behaviour aside and realise the strength of collaboration.
Typically, when you ask a business person about their progress, their immediate response tends to revolve around growth figures – 'We're 20% up from last year' – under the assumption that growth equates to robustness and sustainability. However, empirical evidence doesn't support this assumption.
Since we started really living these tools, we are now better at uncertainty than we were even two years ago. You can't go back to believing that it's too risky, you've got to keep going.
Failure is an important tool with which one can reassess and reconstruct an idea or process, it is an essential element of the feedback loop. Failure should be used to step back and question your method and weaknesses. To recognize failure early can ultimately make one much stronger down the road.
Think about how that feels when you're told that for this essential skill that is part of the astronaut job, you're not needed. It's as if they were saying, 'You don't bring anything essential and we won't miss you.' That encouragement pushed me to show up to spacewalking meetings I wasn't initially invited to.