From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
For me, it's about the power of storytelling. Everything we do is rooted in story. People resonate with stories. I can't tell you how many times I've sat with some of the most famous or richest people in the world, and when you share a story, you can see them reflecting on their own families, their own experiences.
We adopted in Portugal a National Strategy for Entrepreneurship: Startup Portugal. A strategy that aims to make Portugal the ideal space to create, test, fail and try again.
Sometimes it doesn't matter if the other side doesn't care about fairness; provided you do, you explain what's going on. Now it's arbitrary versus arbitrary versus principle versus arbitrary.
Short-term vision does not allow one to build better businesses and create value. If we keep a long-term perspective in mind, we will go through the good cycles and the bad cycles and reach the other side.
If a company doesn't have a purpose, I think they are wasting their life. Making money should be the result of helping people to build businesses.
When I came back, it didn't take me and my brother long to see that this was a failing business. It had been making the same product since the 1930s. The business was dying.
Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained.
I walked into a club that I didn't even know had my record – thought it was a demo – the engineer who recorded it also happened to be a DJ, he'd been playing it for 2 weeks and it'd become the biggest song in the club, this unknown group called Chick or Cheek or whatever, he didn't even know what to call it.
Establishing a culture of truth and trust is absolutely critical to being a great leader, and that takes effort and energy every day. You have to ceaselessly reach for truth and trust every day, and you have to be relentless in your pursuit of trust, and show your people that you have their back.
In the end, what happened is I climbed Everest, I came back, and inadvertently I had transformed everyone that works at Arçelik literally from people who are working to earn money and live their lives, to people who are working to do their best they possibly could in terms of mitigating this climate crisis.
Toyota's reputation for long-term quality is finished. People aren't going to buy Toyotas, period. It doesn't matter which model. What's happened is sufficient to keep people out of the stores.
What's remarkable about Israel's economy is that in the last few years we have situations which, in any other country, would have been totally disruptive. The incredible thing is that none of these threats have a measurable impact on our economy!