From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Jade Begay, an indigenous woman with roots in a tribe in Mexico, shares a powerful sentiment from her culture: 'What if our best times are ahead of us?' This question challenges us to adopt a more hopeful and forward-thinking mindset, one that can inspire and motivate us towards positive action.
Every soldier who enters the military knows what makes the grass grow. Civilians are like, 'okay… sun? Water? Photosynthesis?…' for us? Its blood, we say the bright red blood makes the green grass grow.
I define culture is three primary parts. The first part is behaviour. It's the behaviours of your employees that get embedded into all the processes we are already doing. The second part is processes. Think of the interview process – hiring, onboarding, recognition, promotion, feedback. All of those should have the behaviours integrated in them, ideally. The last piece is practices. These are kind of the daily, more informal ways that that we interact and connect – how we meet, how we communicate, how we make decisions and even how we learn.
The vision for Zappos was for it to be about the very best customer service and for the Zappos brand to be synonymous with the very best customer service. In order to do that, we had to build a culture where employees genuinely wanted to provide great customer service — where it wasn't a department, but a way of being.
If you go to any rave, or any football event, you will find people chanting in a rhythm- human beings do that. We have this sense to participate and organise- Music lets you rediscover your humanity, and your connection to humanity. When you listen to Mozart with other people, you feel that somehow- we're all in this together.
No regrets culture is a terrible blueprint for living. The idea that you should always be positive and never look backwards is not an effective blueprint for living a decent, meaningful, happy life. It runs against everything we know about the science of emotion!
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. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.
I'm always searching for that black-swan, what is that project, or who is that artist that feels specials, and feels counter-culture. Who is that artist that feels interesting and has a bold, unapologetic point of view? That's what pulls me in- and you know what, if you find that and put the right strategy around it? You can disrupt culture.
Most people would have a nervous breakdown if they didn't have their phone for a day; I would have a total breakdown if there was no culture, no art. I couldn't live without art, it would be impossible.
We need to give women the freedom and confidence to believe and be whatever they want to. This isn't just about business, but about social conditioning in all cultures.
After the Holocaust, such thinking became widely discredited. In the post-war era, other developments also influenced attitudes towards antisemitism, leading to a significant shift in political antisemitism. However, what persisted were the cultural stereotypes – the entrenched narratives and stereotypes about Jews within the culture, ready to be drawn upon whenever they seemed relevant or useful.
If you go to any rave, or any football event, you will find people chanting in a rhythm- human beings do that. We have this sense to participate and organise- Music lets you rediscover your humanity, and your connection to humanity. When you listen to Mozart with other people, you feel that somehow- we're all in this together….