From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There simply isn't enough creativity and bandwidth at the top to deal with the level of complexity and change in today's world. In bureaucratic structures, a small group of leaders can hold the organization's capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt.
What I've learnt is you can only do your best work when you're at the frontier. This is the space where I'm going to do my best work. Whether I succeed or fail, I am going to be the most creative, the most engaged, the most inspired when I'm at that edge.
I don't think about legacy, that's just not me. I think about what we're doing new every single day, across all the different areas we're involved in.
If you go into a business and see an organisational handbook... you're in trouble. When people spend too much time drawing up organisational rules and charts, they're spending less time with customers. Hierarchical structures are the death of flexibility, they are the death of agility and remove the distributed leadership needed to make business work.
You create change in other people when you're totally honest, transparent, and authentic. When you show people who you really are, with all your flaws, with all your vulnerabilities...it moves them. People would come up to me crying and thanking me for telling the truth.
Having a plan, feeling confident and being competent are the greatest antidotes to fear. If you're just trying to deal with the unknown by crossing your fingers and hoping, you will be utterly helpless when a situation finally manifests. In reality, you're rarely (if ever) completely helpless, you allow yourself to be helpless.
One of the things I love most about my job is the diversity in the pace of work across the organization. I truly enjoy being with people from different parts of the world and working with individuals who operate on completely different approaches.
Adversity is happening all around us at the individual level, it's happening at a company level, it's happening at industry levels; and we can either face it and learn from it or we can pretend it's not happening. And I think that is the key.
As a leader, you also realise that calm is contagious. It doesn't matter how you feel inside, if you can portray calm- your people will be calm.
I don't care about legacy – not because I'm not thinking of legacy, but because I'm thinking about how to make the greatest positive difference in the current moment I'm living in, and not obsessing about how I'll be looked back on. You're setting yourself up for misery if you focus too much on legacy honestly, but if you try and make a positive difference in the current moment of your life, you're doing the right thing.
Purpose doesn't come to people sitting at the starting blocks and thinking about purpose. You have to live it.
There are really no defeats in life, just opportunities to become better, stronger.