From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I am also here to send a message to the world: these unprecedented floods demand unprecedented assistance
The silence I employ has agency behind it. I choose to use it strategically as the pause between stimulus and response, differentiating a considered response from a mere reaction. We need more of this kind of silence.
Being an entrepreneur, or even running a large organization, is like being a society builder. The system is bigger than any individual. You can take the same person, place them in different environments—like the old Soviet Union versus the UK or the US—and get completely different outcomes. It's about the system.
Power is decaying because it has become easier to acquire, much harder to use, and thus easier to lose.
Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood. We look at information coming in from the external world, determine what is useful, determine how we understand it, build a fuller picture and effect change. A surgical mindset is very much that.
The story is told sincerely, but the cumulative effect is misleading – a subconsciously organised trick.
Without truthfulness I would never have been able to grow anything of any significance, I would have been 'found out.' Having truthfulness and ethics within a business creates trust among employees at all levels and is critical. I led the company with an approach of complete honesty.
You should never place your value as a human being on results. You don't control the results of the game – people get lucky or go bankrupt. Also, what happens when you achieve your result? What long-term satisfaction does that bring you?
Cross-training stands as a key mechanism to balance mastery and specialisation with flexibility and motivation. However, this doesn't mean that you should cross-train every employee in every task. Such an approach would invariably lead to mediocrity.
When we open a new show, it started with about 20 creators at the table, and I will say to the rest of the company, 'leave them alone. I don't want them to be bugged by HR or finance or administrative stuff. I want them to breathe and eat and sleep only about the artistic content of the next show'.
The most common mistake is to stop challenging when things are going well. I recognise failure as not having made a business better than when you were first involved.
We are at a crossroads where we can either win this battle against HIV or we can lose it. The science is there, the tools are there, but what we need now is the political will and the resources to finish the job.