Wisdom in fragments

You are the custodian of your body. Billions, perhaps trillions, of organisms live in your bowel and your immune system is formed and informed by those organisms.

Rheumatologist and lupus researcher; author on autoimmune diseases

If you take care of this dualistic biological soul, your immune system, and nurture it, you can live to well-beyond 100 years of age. In fact, my belief is that in the next 50 years we'll see people easily living to 130-150 based on sheer medication availability and nurturing their biology.

Rheumatologist and lupus researcher; author on autoimmune diseases

There is a biological force within your body that wants you to live to old age… you could call it your immune system, or your biological soul!

Rheumatologist and lupus researcher; author on autoimmune diseases

This isn't about shareholders becoming like Greenpeace but realising that return on investment requires you to understand your risks and that requires you to understand, and act on, your relationship with society.

Your social mission has to genuinely deliver for society and genuinely deliver for business. If your social mission isn't rooted in delivering for the business, it simply isn't going to last.

Today's workers don't want their own reputation soiled by working for a company that doesn't have a good reputation. They want to feel their work has meaning, and the companies they work for have a purpose.

If you're sourcing trainers from sweatshops, those sweatshops can be filmed on a mobile phone and that can go viral in hours, destroying shareholder value. There are no dark-corners in which supply chains can hide anymore.

Leaders cannot delegate social mission to 'somewhere else' in the business. There's pressure coming from the digital world, from shareholders, investors, workforce and government. Leaders can no longer afford for social mission to be done on the side; it has to be built into the core model.

The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

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.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

When you start- the thing that you start with is almost never the thing that becomes successful. Lo-and-behold, in April 1998, when we finally launched this company – they were right, it didn't work, it was a terrible idea.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

The right idea is one that fascinates you, that you can't get out of your mind, that's a puzzle you want to solve. The path from a raw idea to success is a long one- full of frustration, dead-ends. If you don't have something that genuinely fascinates you, you're going to give-up long before the point you finally stumble on the thing that works.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

Power is relational; we talk about seizing power but ultimately – at least in democratic societies – you need the followers to be powerful, and it's important therefore for us to understand the cognitive biases that mean that we keep gravitating towards people who are clearly unfit for the job.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

Digital media has allowed a complete bypass of those structures – there's less control around power – and people can amass huge followings for totally irrational reasons.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

If someone is commanding in their presence, it directly correlates to how a group judges their skill level! Someone who is commanding in presence is often followed over someone who is far more effective but who is quiet, hesitant, or timid.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

Our brains are adapted to pick leaders based on characteristics that are no longer adaptive, or necessary today. In times of crisis, we are wired to gravitate towards strong men – strong males who are overconfident and speak of solutions in simplistic terms.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy